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Wirth to Pay for New Virgin Chassis

Virgin Racing will have to wait until the Spanish Grand Prix in early May to actually hope to finish a race in Formula One. The team has discovered that the size of their car's fuel tank is not enough to take on the necessary amount of fuel to finish a race, therefore will have to build a new chassis to implement a bigger tank.

Amid recent reports that Sir Richard Branson is considering withdrawing his financial support for the Virgin Racing outfit due to this immense mistake by the developers of the 2010 chassis – namely Wirth Research – it has now been confirmed that Nick Wirth will not charge the team with any money for solving the problem.

The chassis supplier is us. Nothing to do with engine supplier or fuel supplier. What that means is that we are fixing it for the team. We are not charging the team. It's our responsibility to provide cars that can finish a grand prix. It's down to us,” said Wirth, who is also technical engineer for Virgin Racing, according to Autosport.

Neither of Virgin's two racers Timo Glock or Lucas di Grassi has managed to finish one race until now, which is something that will undoubtedly happen at least until the Spanish GP. At least that's what Wirth insisted upon, as he reckoned his team will not use sportscar tactics to get to the finish line.

There are techniques that we learned from sportscars, but that's not racing. We want to race,” added the British technical.

The news means that both the team's drivers will use the upcoming two races in Malaysia and China solely for gathering information on qualifying pace and race behavior – for the laps that they can hold on to during Sunday action – of the VR-01. Once the new chassis will be built, it will first have to undergo the FIA crash tests and only after be debuted in a Grand Prix weekend by the team.

The costs of Wirth Research's mistake is yet to be made public, but we guess we'll find out soon enough.
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