Resources limit Caterham progress - Abiteboul

Cyril Abiteboul, team principal of Caterham F1 has acknowledged that his team's progress is being hindered by a lack of resources, making it impossible at the moment to progress into the midfield.

While the team in the beginning of the year clearly stated it was looking to get into contact with the midfield runners, the reality is a lot different. Caterham was in fact unable to match Marussia in the first races and has only showed improvement since Bahrain where the team introduced the first updates on its Caterham CT03.

“Our infrastructure and our resources do not allow us to change some of the fundamental and structural characteristics of a chassis that was designed in 2011, raced in 2012 and carried over in 2013,” he said to F1.com.

Indeed, designing a new chassis is costly, and hence the team are carrying this over to try to limit expenses. It was earlier also suggested that Caterham was aiming for a big leap with the new regulations in 2014, but knowing that this will be a long and costly development path for all teams, it may be impossible to move up the grid anytime soon.

“I'm not going to make any predictions about where we'll be after either the next six races or at the end of the year, but we have new parts coming for nearly every race this year, so we're doing what we can to keep fighting and keep learning about ourselves,” he revealed, “We have to balance that against the need to ramp up our 2014 work, but we can manage that and I'm sure there will be races that suit our car where we can show more clear progress, and I'm also afraid there will be more races like Canada where we don't do ourselves justice. Whatever happens, we must make sure to learn, and improve, like we are doing right now from the difficulties we had in Montreal.”

The Frenchman concluded by noting that Mark Smith, the team's technical director is doing a good job leading the young design team, but acknowledges that Marussia have done a great job in the last 18 months.