Virgin Much Slower than Lotus - Glock

Shortly after Marussia Virgin revealed their 2011-spec single-seater in early February, their leading race driver Timo Glock had announced quite bold aims for the upcoming campaign. Apart from targeting the more established teams of the series, not only direct rivals Team Lotus, Glock insisted he'll be going for early points in the season, including in Australia.

Twelve test days later and the German driver has become more realistic ahead of the 2011 season opening Australian Grand Prix, given that he realized the pace of his new MVR-02 is not as impressive as he would have liked.

Not only he thinks Virgin will have a hard time scoring points this season, but he admitted his team is currently behind Team Lotus in terms of car performance. And according to the info he has from within the team, the situation is unlikely to change until the Turkish Grand Prix, the 4th round of the 2011 season, scheduled in early May.

“I have to say our lap times do not look good,”said Glock, according to spox.com. The German missed the last 4 days of testing this off-season due to an appendix surgery he had to sustain a couple of weeks back.

“Compared to Lotus, we are lagging behind quite a bit on the long runs. We are definitely a bit off where we wanted to be and I can only hope that our technical director Nick Wirth can give us a good car for the fourth race in Turkey,” he added.

From all the 2011 competitors, the MVR-02 racer is the only one that has been developed entirely based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) work.