Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsLotus F1

Gastaldi tells Lotus to investigate race pace

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Lotus deputy team principal Federico Gastaldi wants the team to investigate its race pace in order to provide a bigger challenge to Williams in the Austrian Grand Prix.

Having qualified fifth and sixth in Canada with Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado respectively, Lotus was confident of battling Williams - which also uses a Mercedes power unit - in the race. However, neither car threatened Valtteri Bottas who went on to finish third, while Felipe Massa even climbed through the field to finish ahead of both Lotus drivers and Gastaldi told F1i he is not satisfied with the car’s relative pace in the race.

“Obviously we have to try to do some homework this week to try to understand what happened and try to be more competitive at the next race in Austria,” Gastaldi said. “We’re getting there. There’s still a lot of work to do. I always say we have a fantastic team of people in Enstone, very experienced, very skilled. The drivers are fantastic, if we give them a good car, they deliver.

“We understand that in Enstone we have the right human material to produce good cars. We have to understand things, [potential new parts] will be put on the table this week. At Silverstone there might be more improvements in the next couple of weeks. If we can produce some improvements we will.”

Despite being disappointed by the car’s pace, Gastaldi was more impressed with Maldonado’s performance as he scored his first points of the season.

“He did a fantastic job. As I keep saying from last year. People might not be aware but back in 2010 we tried to hire him and actually Vitaly Petrov’s management were more hands on in the opportunity. I happen to know him from the past and he’s a very quick driver.

“He has the potential so we know that if we give him a good car … he can make mistakes sometimes like any other driver. He had problems in Australia and Malaysia which were not his fault, just racing incidents. But if we give him a good car, he can deliver, that’s for sure. He has shown that he can be very fast.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.