Timo Glock is hopeful that Virgin will continue to improve and get on top of its mechanical gremlins, after a reasonable drive to eighteenth place.
Although the German made a poor start and dropped down the order, he soon found his feet to move up the order and compete with HRT and Virgin.
As a result, the 28-year-old continues to be happy with the progess that the team has made, but is hoping for it to get to the bottom of the technical issues which continue plague its preparations each weekend.
Team-mate Lucas di Grassi retired after damaging his suspension whilst running over a kerb.
Timo Glock – 18th: “It was a difficult start to the race as Lucas overtook me in a brilliant move, following the problems we experienced on Saturday which left us starting from the last row of the grid as a consequence of our gearbox change penalty. However, I had a really good start and overtook both HRT cars in turn one, which was good, but in turn 2 I lost everything again. It felt as if someone pushed me in the back and I ran wide and suddenly I was last again. I had to start the fight against the HRT again and overtook Yamamoto but I was stuck behind Senna because he had a good top speed. After the pitstop I had pretty good speed but then the blue flags came out again which penalised me too much. With the option tyre I had clear air and good pace. Overall I was happy with the race. I just hope we can find a way to get a smoother build-up over the weekend because it will make life a lot easier.”
Lucas di Grassi – DNF: “I had a very positive start to the race today as I gained four places on the first lap and was running up behind Heikki for many laps. The car was behaving well, so I was confident we could beat Lotus on the track today and really push after the switch to the option tyre. I hit a bump on the kerb which damaged the suspension and so I lost the car. The damage meant that it was impossible to continue so what could have been a really great race ended early for me. However, we have shown the strength of the car here so I’m really looking forward to the Hungarian Grand Prix next weekend.”
John Booth, Team Principal: “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster weekend for us, starting out with a strong Free Practice on Friday, followed by the disappointment of our problems on Saturday and then a really strong race for both Timo and Lucas. It is frustrating that having pulled it all back today in the race we lost Lucas’ car in the closing stages, but I think the whole team goes to Hungary with great anticipation for a strong weekend.”
Nick Wirth, Technical Director: “A very encouraging day for the team. We chose a conservative strategy of starting both cars on prime tyres and at the beginning the extra performance of the Option tyres allowed Heikki to open up a small gap which became bigger when the blue-flag-hell started. At the same time, Timo got stuck behind Bruno for a long time before he was able to get Lucas back in his sights. After Heikki finally pitted for his prime tyres, and came out behind us, it was encouraging to see us able to maintain or increase our gap despite his advantage of fresh tyres. Lucas was having another very strong race, when it looks like a very harsh exit kerb caused a rear suspension issue which sadly forced us to retire him. On the other hand, Timo’s race ended with a nice gap in the blue flags which allowed him to put in a sequence of quick laps and finish the best of the new teams. Yesterday, we were frustrated by not being able to show our performance improvements, but we have certainly done that today. In fact Timo’s race fastest lap was only 2.3 seconds down on the leader and 1.4 down on the fastest Williams, which is impressive in our first year. We’ll try and eliminate the issues that tripped us up this weekend and we go to Hungary determined to have a better race again, on a track that should suit our cars current aero characteristics.”
