Peter wrote:Phoenix wrote:I think it'll be very difficult for them to push Virgin back to the end of the grid, but they have no chance in hell of beating Lotus. And they wouldn't have been able to beat Lotus last year. Publicocrapometer much?
HRT might not beat Lotus on pace yet, but they could on reliability, as they did in 2010. If anything the new car is more reliable, now that xtrac is gone. Lotus still has some reliability trouble though.
From set up alone they can beat Virgin on pace. Plus the upgrades that are passing crash tests, will claw a second or two at least. Lotus isn't out of the question.
Sometimes I wonder what HRT could do on more than their rumored budget of 20 million. They could probably beat Torro Rosso on 50 million
I'm dubious that their budget really is that low - Carabantes has been on record to say that their budget this year is €45 million (although where the hell that money is coming from is still not being explained). Carabantes has even suggested that HRT might have a bigger budget than Virgin Racing, thanks to the fact that they are getting more money from FOM, which, if true, is surprising.
As to whether they can beat Virgin Racing or Lotus, that is another, thornier issue. It's true that the T128 has been brittle in testing - the cooling system seems to be a particularly weak point - and the MVR-02 has had a few problems too (although it seems that Xtrac have made some improvements over the off season).
In theory, the F111 is built from fairly well proven parts - Cosworth engine, which has been pretty solid in terms of reliability at least, a Williams gearbox and hydraulics system etc. - but, on the other hand, HRT haven't proven that all of those system will work as expected over the course of a complete race distance (plus the additional mileage clocked up during practise and qualifying, which is substantial in itself).
I expect that even if they do manage to qualify in Malaysia, there is still a fairly high possibility that one or both cars could retire with mechanical problems because of a lack of pre-season stress testing. We saw how Ferrari didn't have their problems with the pneumatic system of their cars until partway through the 2010 season, since it was a problem that hadn't been experienced during bench testing or pre-season testing, when the cars were mostly running in short to medium length stints.
As for the influence of set up work, it cannot be denied that HRT could potentially make very big gains there in Malaysia - but, then again, so could all of the backmarkers. Lotus, for example, were suffering from a lot of set up problems - Trulli suggested that Pirelli had either modified the tyres for Melbourne or given Lotus a duff set of tyres, since the tyres were behaving very differently compared to the pre-season data they had - and Virgin Racing were not entirely happy with their car set up either. They could yet find a few tenths, or more, in their cars, so HRT could well reduce the gap but might not necessarily be able to completely close up for a few more races, when they've finally built up enough set up data to really fine tune the cars.
The biggest problem, though, is that the most unpredictable races, when you can finish abnormally high, tend to occur at the start of the season, when HRT might be most vulnerable to a DNQ or DNF. Virgin Racing, for example, have bagged a 14th place finish in Melbourne (after the Saubers were DSQ'd), with Trulli getting 13th place. Even if HRT do improve, without a freak result they are likely to struggle to get a 12th place on pure pace alone - so they could well find themselves being faster than their rivals at a time when they can't take advantage of it.
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