Heikki Kovalainen is predicting a competitive season for his Team Lotus outfit as they look to climb into the midfield having finished tenth during their rookie season.
The Finnish driver believes that development will be key to finishing the season in a strong position – and he’s confident Team Lotus have built a good basis to build on with the T128.
“We have a much more advanced package to build on this year,” he said. “Last year the base of the car was such that we knew that we couldn’t do much about it.
“It was just a matter of surviving the season, getting that 10th place, then moving on,” he admitted.
“This car is very different, it’s been designed like a proper F1 car. We have a stronger rear end on the car, aerodynamically the car is better, the weight of the chassis is better, so we can build a lot more around this.
“So I think people can expect that we’ll be aiming to get closer to the teams ahead of us as the season goes on.”
In regards to the teams current form, going by pre-season testing, the former-McLaren driver avoided any definitive order, but suggested the Norfolk based team was running in the midfield.
“I don’t want to make any predictions at the moment, you just don’t know what people are doing.
“Sometimes we’re lapping four seconds quicker than Red Bull and another time they’re lapping six seconds quicker than us, you just don’t know what’s going on with different fuel loads, tyres and parts of their testing programme.”
He concluded: “All I can say so far is that testing this year has gone much better compared to last year. We’ve always been in the middle of the timing sheets, we’ve been much, much closer to the cars ahead of us than last year.”
Discussion about this post