Caterham wants to get closer to a top 10 in Monaco

Heikki Kovalainen never had the opportunity to win the Monaco Grand Prix, but according to him, it is the race that all F1 drivers dream of winning one day: Monaco is the race that everyone in F1 wants to win, and it is not just a famous F1 race, it is one of the biggest events of the year worldwide. For the drivers, it’s quite a challenging race, both inside and outside the cars, but it’s a challenge I really enjoy and racing in these streets is one of the good sides of being an F1 driver.

For what will be the 6th race of the season, the Finnish driver expects to see the Caterham team competitive as the gaps will be smaller than usual in the Principality, and with the use of KERS this season, he hopes to get closer to a top 10 race finish: On the track, it’s one of the races where the field is really close, and that might give us a chance to do something special. Last year, I finished 14th, one of our best finishes of the season, so hopefully, we can do even better this year. We have KERS this year, and the car has a good pace, and since our car is a bit gentler on the tires than some teams ahead of us, maybe that will help us deliver a great race.

For his part, Vitaly Petrov doesn’t have only good memories of Monaco. He has already secured podiums in the past in lower categories, but last year, he couldn’t see the checkered flag due to an accident: “I’ve raced a lot in Monaco, not just in Formula 1. I scored a podium there in GP2 when I finished second in 2009, which was good. In F1, I’ve raced twice. The first time wasn’t great, but last year was good until the moment I had an accident! It was so disappointing, but I couldn’t avoid it. We had a good strategy, and I was having a good race until then, but that’s racing. Monaco is an incredible place anyway.”

The Russian driver knows that he won’t be allowed any mistakes, because with the presence of rails, the slightest error is costly. But no matter, Petrov loves racing through the streets of Monaco: «The track itself is always a bit dirty at the beginning of the weekend, and this makes it complicated to properly warm up the tires. It’s tricky because the walls are so close. If you make a mistake or have a bit of oversteer, you don’t even have a chance to correct it – you’re in the wall. It requires mental preparation, and you have to be completely focused on every lap. The race itself? The atmosphere during the race is incredible. It’s simply a magical place to drive a race car, and I love it».

On the single-seater side, Monaco is a major challenge, as Mark Smith, the technical director of the Caterham team, admits. The single-seaters use specific aerodynamic setups to achieve maximum downforce: The short length of the lap and the few high-speed sections mean there is less lap time difference than elsewhere, like in Barcelona, for example. We use maximum downforce settings, and we have a specific aero configuration that we will use in Monaco and probably in Hungary, but the days of seeing all sorts of specific wings for Monaco are now over. The cars may not look much different from what they were in Spain, but we need to have as much downforce as we can find for the whole weekend in Monte Carlo.

The other challenge is to ensure proper cooling of the car, both in terms of the engine and the brakes. The Malaysian team feels ready to tackle this challenge as they have tested solutions during the Mugello tests in preparation for this Monaco Grand Prix: « The other challenges we face are brake cooling and tire wear. Even if it’s a lap of acceleration/braking, the brakes are not heavily stressed because speeds are never as high as on a normal circuit, but there is a real need to ensure that the brakes are cooled as efficiently as possible, and this is something we worked on during the Mugello tests, so we are happy to have found a good solution in this area.»

The tires will be the last complicated point to manage for the teams, especially since they will be using the Super-Soft tires for the first time this season: « We have planned for tire wear as best as possible, but we have seen so far this season that it’s hard to know which teams will wear out their tires the fastest and which teams will be able to manage this wear rate better before actually being on the track. We will have the Softs and the Super-Softs in Monaco, and if the wear on the Softs is as critical as in Spain, the strategy will be crucial.»