Going forward as a team - Kovalainen
The Finnish ING Renault F1 Team driver, Heikki Kovalainen, was a guest of the FIA this afternoon at the official press conference, and shed some light on the challenges facing the world champions at the moment.
"In one week I think not, unless there has been a miracle we don’t know about. Clearly we are behind the top pace and obviously we are not happy about that. The whole factory is trying to understand the cause, but this weekend the gap to the leaders will be about the same. Hopefully, though, we’ll score points again."
Perhaps the point I should have made is that there are fewer high-speed corners here than in Malaysia and you looked better in testing here than you did at Sepang."The test before Sepang was pretty good, too, and we thought we’d made a good step, but looking back other teams had made an even bigger step because there was a bigger gap between us and the leaders in Sepang than there was in Melbourne. As you said, there are fewer high-speed corners, which should help us a little bit, but in any case I think we shouldn’t think about that too much and just get on with it."
Is it a specific front- or rear-end problem or just a basic lack of grip?"Since the day we bolted these tyres on before Christmas, the balance between the teams shifted significantly and we haven’t yet recovered from that well enough. We don’t exactly know what the problem is with the tyres, but the feeling is not the same as last year and we have not been able to point out a single element that is wrong with the car. I think it is coming from many different things. We still have a strong team, with the same people that won championships last year, and a strong engine. We are looking at many different questions. When can we answer them? We can’t say at the moment. We don’t have any time scale, but we are working very hard."
Heikki, this year McLaren is clearly more competitive than the last few championships; Renault the opposite. Is Alonso switching from one team to the other a key factor in this improvement and why?"Obviously, if you ask the question to me, it’s not a problem. Clearly (the difference in) our pace compared to the front runners is so big - I think the engineers have calculated it at about 1.8 percent in terms of lap time – so I don’t think even Alonso would be able to overcome that deficit. That’s not what we’re looking at the moment. We’re clearly trying to understand the car better, give it better feeling for the driver, so we are able to push more. That’s my opinion."
Heikki, things going like this with Renault and McLaren, it seems you are not able to compete to become the rookie of the year. How disappointed are you with that?"Well, of course that’s something that would have been nice to achieve and it’s still possible with many races to go but at the moment, that’s clearly not the priority for us. I think the priority for our team is to understand exactly why we are not able to run at the front, and obviously at the same time, we need to keep developing the car like we planned before the year, but then when we find the solutions and I’m sure eventually we will find the answers why we are not competing, then we put the problem together to develop the car and if it happens early enough, we will fight back, but honestly, I’m not thinking about that at the moment. The priority is to go forward as a team."
Source Renaultf1
