Lotus is now 'fully' concentrating all of its resources on 2011 and trying to close on the established teams, Mike Gascoyne has confirmed ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix.
Gascoyne told reporters on Friday at Spa-Francorchamps that the main goal now is to be able to race 'properly' with the established teams next year.
“For us it is very clear,” stated Lotus’ Chief Technical Officer “We are fully focused on next year’s car and have been for several months now. I think while it is still important for us to try and maintain tenth place in the championship the most important thing as one of the new teams is that we make that step and close the gap to the established teams. We need to be able to race them properly.
“I think just being on the grid for us was a huge achievement but you are only a new team once. We are not a new team next year, we are a Formula One team and we have to make sure that we are performing as one, so we have very much switched our focus onto next year’s car.
“It is quite an auspicious day for us. Today was the day a year ago that we actually first walked around our factory and there were three of us. Now there are 220 of us. We hope that we can do a better job for next year, so that is clearly where our focus is.”
As for how things have gone this season, Gascoyne added that the progress has been more or less what he expected.
“As I said earlier we didn’t have an entry this time a year ago and we didn’t know we were actually going to be in the sport, so we missed several months of development. If we had had that I think we would have done a much better job,” he continued.
“But our aim coming into this year was always to try and be the best of the new teams, try to close the gap to the established teams and do a thorough, professional job. We had some big updates which moved us forward but in reality we were never going to challenge for ninth place or any of the established teams. Overall I think we have pretty much delivered exactly what we wanted to do.
“We would prefer to be a bit closer but time just hasn’t allowed that for us. I think we would have been much happier being more reliable too. That has been a disappointment to us. Some of that has been out of our control through outside suppliers and we have got to make sure we put that right for next year.
“But I think we have pretty much delivered what we expected to deliver and on budget as well as my boss keeps reminding me to be,” he summed-up.
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