Backmarker wrote:Wallio wrote:I can only assume (due to Fernades being richer than God) that it was Marussia leading the way on this. So what happens when they beat Catheram and take the 10th place $$$? I love irony.
I feel like Tony Fernandes is getting bored with his toy. That's why he's gone from a decent Trulli-Kovalainen line-up to an understandable Petrov-Kovalainen line-up to a deep-pocketed Pic-van der Garde line-up
To be fair, it isn't as if Pic is totally without talent - he has a reasonable record in the junior series (3rd place in FR3.5 and a 4th in GP2 in a year when 2nd to 4th were separated by two points), and most would say that his performance against Glock in 2012 was respectable enough for a rookie driver.
To be honest, Fernandes's approach to Caterham does seem a little odd at times. On the one hand, the team has gone to the expense of a move to Leafield and overhauling the old facilities there, whilst they went to the trouble of poaching John Iley from McLaren only a year after he was promoted to Head of Aerodynamics there and hired Cyril Abiteboul from Renault Sport to take over the Team Principal role. At the senior management layer, therefore, the team has a fair number of talented people amongst its ranks and has continued to expand them, so in terms of manpower and resources the team still seems to be getting some attention (the budget, as far as I am aware, is still reasonably healthy).
On the other hand, though, the driver choice seems relatively weak by comparison - I know that it is probably the case that the team thinks it can gain far more from improving the car than the drivers, but that can only extend so far.
Back to Marussia though, and some of Bianchi's recent comments where he has actually been moderately complimentary about the MR02 - going as far as saying that he was surprised that the car felt a lot better to drive than he had expected it to be.
“I was pretty surprised when I drove it for the first time. My expectation was a lot lower than that, I was really happy when I drove it,” said Bianchi in the press conference ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix.
“I think we can do a good result. We know what we have to improve again so we’re just trying to do that and trying to improve the car, trying to improve myself as well because I’m new in the team, new in Formula One and I want to show people what I’m able to do so I will try to do my best for all the races now.”
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2013/03/21/b ... rformance/OK, I doubt that Marussia will celebrating the news that their car isn't as rubbish as he'd expected, but his optimism doesn't seem totally unjustified - his pace compared to Bottas in Melbourne was fairly respectable even if he did have to make a late unplanned pit stop near the end, and although it has been confirmed that there will not be any updates for Malaysia simply because of time constraints, he seems confident that the increased amount of seat time he racked up in Australia should help offset that.
