Earlier this week, we had reported to you – via Finland's Turun Sanomat – that Kovalainen admitted a poor level of performance for the T127 after the first 4 days of testing on Jerez and Barcelona. Asked to compare his new car to the one he used to drive for Minardi F1 some 6 years ago, in testing, the Finnish driver reportedly said the Lotus is much worse.
“The Lotus is probably missing more aerodynamically than the Minardi cars (were) when you compare them with the top (cars),” Kova was quoted as saying during the weekend.
Bear in mind that we are talking about a car that scored a single point throughout the entire season of 2003, the team's first in the last 2 years (at that time).
However, writing to his and Lotus' fans on his twitter page, the former McLaren driver insisted that the report wasn't as accurate as initially believed and that his comments were taken out of the context.
According to some recent comments from Lotus' technical director Mike Gascoyne, the T127 is currently some 3.5 seconds behind the front-runners, after starting the testing season almost 6 seconds behind.
The first test at Jerez saw the Lotus F1 Team sit out almost an entire day following a driving mistake made by Kovalainen in one of the turns of the circuit, as the team lacked the spare parts to send the car back to action during the same day.
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