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Marussia Virgin Wants to Score Points Early in 2011

Timo Glock's aspirations for the 2011 Formula 1 season are nothing short of optimistic, as the German seems to target early points in the upcoming campaign. Yes, you're reading this the right way, now Marussia Virgin Racing wants a piece of the F1 pie, only this newly-entrant aims for a point finish early in the season, rather than later on.

The Russian team (because the squad will run under a Russian license following its partnership with Marussia Motors carmaker) unveiled its 2011-spec car earlier today, in London, and the expectations set for their only second campaign in the series might seem a bit gutsy. According to Glock, early points is what he will be targeting starting the very upcoming group test in Jerez, scheduled this week.

We want to grab points in first races and then work from there,” said Glock at the media event in BBC Television Centre, in London. “We are much more sorted out, more structured, we have one year experience so we should be on a good way.

But we have to realistic, we were 3-4 seconds off the pace last year and you never catch 3-4 seconds in winter time, so we have to make some improvement and then move up. I am hoping for a realistic step. I am happy to do a proper step over the winter with the team together and be strong in first races.”

Having developed their entire F1 car based only on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and dropping wind tunnel work completely, Virgin Racing designer Nick Wirth insisted that the MVR-02 is in every aspect better than its predecessor, the VR-01. According to Wirth, work on this challenger begun since midway 2010.

Since the middle of year we worked on process, we calibrated how fast we had to improve and what did we have to work on,” said Wirth. “We have done a huge amount of development of physics and what we are doing to catch up with everyone.”

The back of car is heavily regulated from last year, and we managed to take this car and not only catch up where we were, but go above it in terms of aero efficiency - in every single way this car is faster and better than last year,” he added.

Team principal John Booth also echoed the comments of Glock and Wirth, only his aims for the season start were a bit more realistic.

Our first target is regular spots in Q2, that's a good platform to move from. We want to be there as much as possible,” he said, avoiding to give a timeframe for this target to be achieved.
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