Wrong race decisions cost Caterham 10th in championship
After a strong start to the race, both Caterham cars moved backwards, by incidents or due to the race circumstances. Alltogether, this made Heikki Kovalainen finish 15th and Petrov 19th. Importantly, the team now drops to 11th in the constructors' championship, behind Marussia.
Heikki Kovalainen, car 20, chassis CT01-#3:
“For me that was a good race until the safety cars. We decided to stay out but when we restarted for the second time I’d probably been out too long and the tyres were starting to give up. I had to stop again and there wasn’t enough time to recover from there so that was the end of the race - If it hadn’t been for the safety car I’m sure we’d have finished much higher. Now we need to dig even deeper to find more performance from the car. We’ll look at what went wrong this weekend and I’m sure the team will analyse everything and see where we maybe need to make some changes, but we won’t stop fighting.”
Vitaly Petrov, car 21, chassis CT01-#2:
“I had a fantastic start, passed at least two or three cars but then I saw a car to my right make a pretty aggressive move left so I had to move to avoid that. I was very close to Massa and already into the braking zone so unfortunately we had contact and my front wing was damaged, forcing me into the pits. Really, that was the end of my race and probably Felipe’s and I’ve already apologised to him as we get on well and it’s a shame we both saw our chances to race end so early, especially as the car has felt good all weekend.
“The safety car might have given me a chance to recover but we had a problem with the front left wheel nut and we’ll need to have a proper look at what happened. I think we also need to look at how we were using the tyres as maybe we could have got more out of them, but we have the chance to bounce back in Suzuka and we’ll make sure we do that.”
Mark Smith, Technical Director:
“We opted to start both cars on the supersoft tyres and until the safety car was brought out the plan was working with Heikki. Vitaly was obviously unlucky in the first lap but he did not let his head drop, he continued to push and was putting in good times on each stint, but he then had a double dose of misfortune when we had a problem on his fourth stop with the front right.
“For Heikki it was a different story. He was running well until the safety cars but on his last stint he had to work very hard to keep the tyre performance in check. His times were where we expected them to be but had his race not been interrupted by the incidents around him I think he could have finished several places higher."
Tony Fernandes, Team Principal:
“Not a good day for us. We made a couple of decisions today that cost us, but we will take a very close look at what went wrong and make sure we learn from it. I said yesterday that there are promising signs ahead and I still believe that, but now we need to regroup and fight harder than ever in the remaining races.”
