Racing Point aiming for rapid upgrades from Spain onwards

After the team's near-death experience last summer, the resurrected Racing Point team has remained on the back foot as it seeks to regroup and rebuild heading into the 2019 season.

Although the squad has picked up points at each of the first three races, it's still languishing down in eighth place in the constructors championship. That's a long way from the fourth it habitually held in its former incarnation.

But the team says it has a plan to get back up to speed with a rapid cycle of upgrades planned once F1 is back in Europe, beginning with Spain in mid-May.

• Driver shake-up adds 'new dynamic' to Racing Point - Szafnauer

"Spain is where things start to happen," promised technical director Andrew Green. "We've got updates coming thick and fast.

Green admitted that the team's performance hasn't been up to par so far this season, and confirmed that the cash crisis that saw it go into administration mid-way through 2018 was still a factor.

"We're still a long way off where we want to be, that's for sure," he told Motorsport.com this week. "It takes time to build the team up to challenge where we want to be challenging.

"Other teams have made big steps," he added. "We've been cash-strapped for many years.

"It's going to take time to build up the team and move it forward, we've just got to be patient," Green continued. "The updates that we've put on, we're getting closer to optimising them."

He said that the in-season test in Sakhir following the Bahrain Grand Prix had been an invaluable help to the team in preparing its next steps.

In the meantime there's the Azerbaijan Grand Prix to face next weekend. Green insisted that Baku's street circuit could be a better track for Racing Point and could yield some strong results for Sergio Perez and Lance Stroll.

"Baku has always been strong for us, and hopefully it will be strong again this year," he said. "We'll just have a Baku specific downforce kit."

The team is hoping for a better qualifying performance this time around. Racing Point has only made one appearance in Q3 so far in 2019 with Perez getting into the top ten at Melbourne, but just missing out since then.

Green admitted that this was simply a reflection of the team's current performance.

"Eleventh and 12th on our numbers was always better than ninth and 10th, as far as qualifying positions were concerned," he said. "So we were happy with 12th on the grid. You're never going to beat the top six.

And Green was keen to defend the performance of Stroll since he joined the squad from Williams over the winter, saying there aas more to come from the Canadian.

"He's been really unlucky," suggested Green. "The potential is there, and it will come through.

"We always said it's going to take half a season for him to settle into the team and for us to understand his need and for him to understand how we work.

"We're still in that process," he added. "It's not something that's going to happen overnight. We see it all the time with drivers coming into a new team, it takes some tome to adapt, and he's exactly the same. But he'll get there."

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