Sunday: the Caterham drivers gave it their all
Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov feel they did their best today in Spain. The two Caterham drivers believe they couldn't have done better. They finished 16th and 17th but they know there's still progress to be made and they eagerly await Monaco to get involved in the midfield battle.
Heikki Kovalainen – 16th
I think I got the most out of the car this afternoon. I had a good start, passed Senna, and was in the pack until the second round of stops. The first stint on softs was good, and we had kept soft tires until the last stop, but maybe that last stint on hards was too long. But we still had a good race and proved that we had good pace on Sunday, enough to easily pull away from the teams behind, but not enough to be able to fight throughout the race with the cars in front of us. We knew this circuit would be one of the most difficult for us, but now we’re going to Monaco with a chance to fight for a better position, so we’re going to keep closing the gap and hope to reach a new level for the next race.
Vitaly Petrov – 17th
I’m delighted with the way I drove this afternoon and, like Heikki, I don’t think I could have extracted more performance from the car today. Yesterday, we found a good KERS mapping for qualifying but this afternoon it didn’t work as well during the first and second stints, and I think that’s where we lost time to Heikki. Tire wear was higher than during the long runs in free practice, so we need to study why this happened and how to fix this issue for the upcoming races. Aside from that, it was one of those races where we extracted the maximum, and now we can head to Monaco where the track and the difficulty of overtaking should give us a better chance to challenge the cars ahead throughout the weekend.