Racing Point believe they can take a best-ever finish of third in the championship if they have a trouble-free run to the end of the year.
The team lies third overall with six races remaining, but rivals McLaren and Renault are within six points of them. Racing Point had a 15-point deduction earlier in the year after they were found to have broken the rules in designing their rear brake ducts.It has been a rocky four months for the team, who have called on the services of substitute driver Nico Hulkenberg three times. Lance Stroll crashed heavily in Mugello due to a suspected puncture, destroying one of the team’s recently introduced upgrade packages and damaging a power unit, and was taken out of the Russian Grand Prix by Charles Leclerc.
Asked what the team needs to do to hold onto its third place until the end of the year, technical director Andrew Green said: “To stop getting a lot of bad luck, to start with!”
“We just don’t seem to be getting the run of the green at the moment. I just want a normal race weekend. We haven’t a normal race weekend probably since race one of this season.”
Despite having to call on Hulkenberg again at the Nurburgring after Stroll pulled out of the weekend half an hour before final practice, Racing Point managed to out-score both its closest rivals.
“Something happens every weekend,” said Green. “All we need between now and the end of the season is just to have normal race weekends where we can race the car, set it up normally, just have a normal weekend without any major distractions, and that will give us our best possible opportunity.”
The team recently introduced its one major upgrade of the season. “We pulled together all the updates that we planned to do into a significant update for the car,” Green explained. “That included the front wing, front brake ducts, floor, rear wing end plates sidepods, bodywork. So that was that was a big one, that was the aerodynamic aspect.
“On the rear suspension we did a lot of work on the internals of the rear suspension and the way that the suspension works to give us more flexibility and more options on the rear suspension set-up and also a change to the steering system as well. All of those updates came between Mugello and Russia.”
Following this step Green is confident the team can put up a strong fight against Renault and McLaren to the end of the year. “It’s going to be a real battle,” he said. “There’s three teams that are just swapping places all the time. It’s going to be a good fun end to the season.”
Racing Point finished seventh in the championship last year and achieved a best position of fourth in its previous guise as Force India. It scored its highest finishing position, third, as Jordan in 1999.
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NewVerstappenFan (@jureo)
16th October 2020, 12:35
If only they had a decent multiple WDC winner to spin their car around.
Not George
16th October 2020, 13:19
“It’s not bad luck, it’s bad engineering” as Colin McRae said (stop throwing it off the road was probably Prodrive’s reply). There’s no such thing as “luck”.
Simeon
16th October 2020, 13:39
Agreed.
Simply put, the third fastest team should be third in the championship, especially in a competition as controlled as F1.
Race strategy and poor operations let the team down on Sunday AFAIK.
bookgrub (@bookgrub)
16th October 2020, 13:55
Maybe not technically but losing (at different times) both drivers to illness along with Stroll’s blameless puncture and Russian GP exit (where, in the self-serving words of Ferrari, he “spun after a collision with the Monegasque”) has cost them a lot of points without any of it being engineering.
juan fanger (@juan-fanger)
16th October 2020, 22:13
The only bit that is still in doubt, AFAICT, is the “puncture” at Mugello, which looked a lot like rear suspension collapse.
“On the rear suspension we did a lot of work on the internals of the rear suspension and the way that the suspension works to give us more flexibility and more options on the rear suspension set-up and also a change to the steering system as well. All of those updates came between Mugello and Russia.”
Maybe they also had some “tweaks” to those “updates” between Mugello and Russia.
ppzzus (@ppzzus)
16th October 2020, 15:58
Looks like perez can handle it all on his own.
IMOLAFTW
16th October 2020, 20:59
Good luck next year with vetted and stroll Racing Point. XD