Sunday: D’Ambrosio beats Glock at Virgin
Virgin Racing once again demonstrated good reliability. The red cars finished in China in 20th and 21st place. Jérôme D'Ambrosio, in the third race of his F1 career, had the luxury of finishing ahead of his teammate, Timo Glock. The German suffered from a problem in the pits and significant wear on his rear tires. During the break, the team expects to make good progress and no longer fear the 107% rule.
Jerome D’Ambrosio – 20th:
I’m very happy with my race. It’s only the second time I’ve seen the finish line and I’m very satisfied with that. I think I made progress throughout the weekend and the race pace was much better than in the last two races. The first lap was a lot of fun, I was able to battle with Timo [Glock] and our starts were very good. He managed to pass me then I overtook him and he passed me again. That’s what I love about racing. I can see that I’m making progress and that’s the most important thing to take away today. From now on, I’m focusing on Turkey.
Timo Glock – 21st:
This was not a very good race, unfortunately from my perspective, but the positive is that we both finished which was our goal. I had a good start and a strong first lap overtaking Jérôme [D’Ambrosio] and keeping the two HRTs behind me.
«The car is experiencing significant tire degradation at the rear. Therefore, we made the decision to switch from a two-stop strategy to a three-stop strategy. But it wasn’t effective as we constantly had blue flags to let the leaders pass. Then, during my last stop, my wheel wouldn’t come off its fixture. We lost time.
«The difficult start to the season is now behind us and we will do everything to bring innovations in Turkey and improve. »
John Booth – Team Director
In absolute terms, today’s result is a very good performance for D’Ambrosio, it’s only the third race of his F1 career. His two-stop strategy was more effective than the three-stop one (for Timo [Glock]) and worked better for us than some of our competitors. Jérôme made it possible and he can only be proud.
« After noticing significant degradation on Timo Glock’s rear tires, we switched him to a three-stop strategy. The decision may have been made too quickly, as we can now say it wasn’t the right solution. We didn’t help Timo Glock well, and when he came into the pit for the last time, we caused him to lose even more time with this problem on his wheel. He worked hard afterward to make up the delay and overtake an HRT. »
The reliability was good this weekend, that’s a good point and the improvements we will make can only bear fruit.
