Although the improvement may not be clearly visible from the outside, Pedro de la Rosa is delighted with HRT’s rate of progress so far in 2012. At the Australian Grand Prix, both he and Narain Karthikeyan failed to qualify for the race. Since then, the Spaniard has been pleasantly surprised by the results picked up.
HRT – formerly Hispania Racing – is effectively a new team this year. With José Ramón Carabante’s group having dispatched of the outfit, it is now owned by Thesan Capital. The change has brought a new-look to the corporate side of the Spanish squad and involved a complete relocation to Madrid across May and June.
“Without a doubt, we’re accomplishing (our targets) and with flying colours, at times,” de la Rosa said on Wednesday. “We started outside the 107 percent in Australia and we’ve reached peaks of 103.6 percent in Monaco and our best qualifying result, which was 103.4 percent in Valencia. That was a very ambitious target we set ourselves because to be close to 104 percent is a realistic objective. We’ve surpassed it and have potential to do more.”
With nine of the 20 Grands Prix remaining, the Barcelona-born driver – who now resides in Munich with his family – is fully confident of more enhanced showings.
“In our case, it’s going to be easier to improve in this second half of the season than it will be for a big team that is striving for perfection, because we’ve got much more room for improvement,” he begins to sum up. “For now we’ve accomplished our objectives, but there are still many races to set ourselves more ambitious targets.”
De la Rosa’s F1 career began in 1999, when he scored a point by finishing sixth in his first race for Arrows. He raced for Jaguar in 2001 and 2002 before beginning a long stint as McLaren test driver. In 2006 he subbed for the departed Juan Pablo Montoya, finishing second to Jenson Button in Hungary, before joining Sauber in 2010 and HRT this year.
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