Virgin Racing team principal John Booth says that he is confident his team can still finish the season as the best of the new teams, despite enduring a somewhat trying and unreliable start to their first ever Formula One season.
Although the Virgin team have arguably been the quicker of the three new teams, fighting with 'Lotus' for bragging rights at all the races so far, the team has struggled to get to the finish of the races, through a rather embarrassing fuel tank issue and numerous other technical niggles.
But Booth, who regained control of the team late last year after briefly handing over the reins to Virgin executive Alex Tai, believes that the team can still claim top spot among the new teams.
"We've had other things [such as a fuel tank too small to go a race distance at race pace], but the gearbox and hydraulics have been far and away the biggest issues for us," Booth rambled to grandprix.com on Wednesday, "And given the schedule and the lack of testing, everything is done in the field in front of half a million people.
"I've got to say though, the Cosworth engine, service and reliability has been brilliant. It's the one constant we've had. I've been over the moon with that."
He added: "I think, once we get reliability nailed and start looking at performance, we can make progress. But Lotus is a good outfit, pretty much the race engineering team from Toyota, and obviously Mike Gascoyne's a bright fellow, so I'm not going to underestimate the challenge [of being the best newcomer]."
The cheery Yorkshireman admitted that the team faced an uphill struggle to keep up throughout the season, particularly given the disparity of budgets between his team and some of the others on the grid, but he said that the team's expectations for 2010 were modest enough to be achievable.
"I'm not sure we're going to keep pace with people spending two hundred million, that would be a bit outrageous, but the reality is we haven't had time to do many updates because 100 per cent of our focus has been trying to achieve reliability," he smiled cheerily.
"Now we've got a little bit of that we can start trying to focus on the performance side.
"I think you have to appreciate the size of the task you are taking on and evaluate targets over three to five years. All I want immediately is for our performance to improve each race weekend. [Benefactor Richard Branson] has seen what Brawn could do on $150-200m or whatever they spent, he knows how much we are trying to do it on and obviously he's got realistic expectations."
He also took time to praise his pair of drivers for keeping faith with the team, despite them only achieving one GP finish so far this season, with Lucas di Grassi's 14th place finish in Malaysia.
"I've been impressed with [Timo Glock's] attitude from day one," Booth grimaced, "We've had our problems but there have been no prima donna tantrums. The lad's got a great work ethic and a great team ethic as well. And he's got a lot of experience, not only at Toyota but in F1 with Jordan and in Champcars too.
"Similarly, I knew [di Grassi] was the right man for us. As well as being a good, quick guy, he's very bright too. He's perfect for us and having Lucas is almost like having two experienced drivers."
The Virgin team are hoping to put some of their reliability issues behind them in Spain, when the team introduces a major upgrade to their VR-01 car, including a larger fuel tank.
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