Reliable Virgin looking to get up to speed for Turkey

Virgin Racing have three weeks to get up to speed – literally.

A major performance upgrade for the fourth race of the season in Turkey on May 8 cannot come quickly enough with the size of the task facing the Yorkshire team being painfully exposed over the opening three grands prix.

John Booth and his paymasters sacrificed pace in favour of reliability for the opening three fly-away races, with the size of their resources and the depth of their pockets limiting them to improving only one vital component of making a car go round a Formula 1 circuit.

To their credit, they have held up their end of the bargain, with Jerome D’Ambrosio’s 14th place in Australia, Timo Glock’s 16th in Malaysia and a double finish in China, suggesting they have made progress, particularly on last year.

Yet those finishes in the first two grands prix came as a result of other teams suffering their own mechanical issues.

Far be it from the Yorkshire team to revel in schadenfreude, the true statistic to reflect the season so far is that Virgin are three seconds behind the teams regularly reaching the second session of qualifying on a Saturday, which – at the behest of the their Russian paymasters, Marussia Motorsports, and the nature of progression in sport – is the Dinnington team’s target this season. It is a sizeable gap, and is down primarily to a distinct lack of downforce, but one they hope to reduce to some extent with this major upgrade.

The new performance package incorporates exhaust, nose and front wing – the latter being the most crucial component in the team’s battle to increase downforce.

Team principal Booth, pictured, said: “Everyone at our technical base is nose to the grindstone ensuring that the Turkey upgrade goes according to plan and delivers the performance gains we expect so we can get back to where we should be for the start of the European season.”

They will need the new package to make an immediate impact if they are to not only close the gap but also appease Glock, who is becoming increasingly restless.

“The balance of the car is not that bad; simply, we just have not enough downforce and the people in the team have to realise that,” he said after the opening race in Melbourne, when Virgin came perilously close to failing to qualify for the grand prix by being nearly 107 per cent outside the fastest car’s time in practice.

“We went forward (over the winter) in terms of the whole structure of the team. The work from the mechanics and the engineering side is much better than last year, but performance-wise, in my opinion, we moved backwards. The others have made massive steps; we are just not able to make these big steps. We didn’t believe it in Barcelona (testing), but now it’s quite obvious that we are not where we should be. The team has to think about certain things and make changes to get us closer. We cannot continue like this. It’s not possible.”

The German’s mood had improved slightly after yesterday’s 21st-place finish in Shanghai when a planned two-stop strategy became a three-stop plan due to the degredation of the Pirelli tyres.

He said: “The team took the decision to convert to a three-stop race but this was not the right way to go because we suffered massively with the blue flags.

“A difficult start to the season is now behind us and we look forward positively to the upgrade that everyone has been working so hard on behind the scenes to ensure we can take a good step forward in Turkey.”

D’Ambrosio finished one place ahead of Glock after he was able to maintain the pace and the tyre degredation to execute a two-stop strategy.

Booth said: “Following some feedback in the race from Timo regarding the degradation he was suffering with the rear tyres, we were perhaps a little too quick to convert him to three stops.”