Sunday: Caterham regains the upper hand against Marussia in the race
The two Caterham-Renault drivers reversed the trend from the qualifications by outpacing the two Marussia-Cosworth cars during the race this Sunday. This time, Vitaly Petrov managed to get ahead of his teammate Heikki Kovalainen to clinch a modest 17th place.
Vitaly Petrov – 17th
Personally, I extracted the maximum possible performance from the single-seater. So I am satisfied with how it went. The start was quite crazy, we all had cold tires and many cars went off track, but I got through it calmly, and as soon as my tires warmed up, I was able to distance myself from my pursuers quite comfortably. We planned to make only one stop, and it was perfect. The guys allowed me to get back on track very quickly after switching to hard tires, and everything went as we wished. Tire degradation was also quite low. We had seen with long runs on Friday that it wouldn’t be a real problem, but apart from a small vibration during braking in the last third of the race, it was a good afternoon with no issues.
Heikki Kovalainen – 18th
« It was one of those races where we probably couldn’t have gotten much more out of the car than we did. I had issues this weekend regarding the front tire temperature and it was the same again today for the first laps. At the start, I gained a place and then passed Glock quite quickly, and from there it was relatively easy to control my pace for the rest of the race. The pit stop went well, the guys did a very good job today, and aside from the tire issue, we couldn’t have hoped for more. »
