RACE DAY…
26/06/2011
It’s all to do at Valencia for LRGP with Nick Heidfeld starting from ninth on the grid and Vitaly Petrov starting from eleventh.
With qualifying yesterday’s news, so the target now is to get both cars up the order come the chequered flag. The Valencia street course has not offered so many overtaking opportunities in the past, however the 2011 regulations with KERS and DRS should change this somewhat.
“It was a disappointing qualifying session,” concedes LRGP’s Chief Race Engineer, Alan Permane, “the real problem is there is not enough pace here in the car to get comfortably into the top ten here.”
Unlike some other races this season, the opportunity of passing in the pits thanks to multiple pit stops might not be as likely this afternoon due to Pirelli’s relatively hard tyre allocation for a street course of the medium and soft compounds.
“The new medium Pirelli has performed reasonable well, but it looks to be 1.5 to 2 seconds a lap slower than the soft,” says Permane, “so minimising the use of this tyre will be key, especially as the degradation of the soft is not that bad – we did a reasonably long run on Friday and we’re happy with how it performs on our car.
“We’re likely to see a mix of two and three pit stops as the track is certainly not as severe on tyres as Barcelona or Turkey.”
The skies are blue and the temperatures are soaring in Valencia this morning, meaning that rain and a race like in Montreal last time out are highly unlikely scenarios.
For both cars now the decision is which tyre to start the race on.
“We can make decide which tyres to start Vitaly on as he starts from outside the top ten and also for Nick too as he didn’t set a timed lap in Q3, so we have greater strategy options open to us.”
Credit: Lotus Renault GP (www.lotusrenaultgp.com)
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