Report Friday: HRT – Every lap is a victory

After the Australian fiasco, HRT set the objective of experiencing a relatively normal weekend with hopes of participating in the race. Despite some reliability issues, which are inevitable during a first real run, the HRT drivers completed nearly 60 laps between them this Friday. While the performances are obviously not up to par yet, HRT can maintain hope as its drivers demonstrated the ability to break the critical 107% mark.

Narain Karthikeyan: 23rd and 21st

« In the morning, we didn’t have the best start, I lost a lot of time because there were some issues with the oil level in the car. The balance is good, now we’re just exploring what the car can do. There are a lot of things to work on.

The second session was good, we only did 15 laps because there was a problem with the car that made me lose half an hour again. We did 25 timed laps so we still have a lot of work to do and that’s what we are doing. It’s not about complaining about what you have, but trying to make the most of it.

**Vitantonio Liuzzi:** 22nd and 22nd

The morning session went well, we started with hard tires but we couldn’t do many laps because we spent most of the time making aero adjustments to understand the car’s balance. But […] the car doesn’t seem too bad. We had some problems with balance and some traction issues as well. That’s why we made some changes for the second session.

The afternoon was not easy because we had a similar problem to the one in Australia with a switch: after driving over a bump, the ignition switch turned off and the car stopped. So, I had to get out of the car just as we were starting our tire tests, which is unfortunate because we couldn’t test as much as we wanted.

Colin Kolles

« Although Narain and Tonio had to stop, these were minor issues as evidenced by the fact that they were able to return to the track. Overall, we can say that today was a good day, I believe that we made some progress and will make a little more tomorrow since this is our first real test with the new car.

It’s good news that Narain is within the 107% today. We haven’t been running in qualifying conditions and the car doesn’t look too bad, we only encountered a small issue with a switch that we will have to fix for tomorrow. Our goal is to improve as quickly as possible, the only way to do that is by working steadily and pushing, you can’t get anywhere by lamenting your own fate. We have new developments that, we hope, will be available for Turkey; we have a wind tunnel program [editor’s note: with Mercedes], everything is coming together, now we need to work on it to take another step forward.