Narain posts HRT F1’s best race finish of the season

Monaco (Monte Carlo): Indian F1 driver Narain Karthikeyan posted his and HRT F1 team’s best result of the season so far by finishing 15th in a chaotic and incident-filled Monaco Grand Prix.

Coming into the sixth round of the 2012 FIA F1 championship, the team’s best finish had been a 19th place at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Starting 22nd on the grid, Karthikeyan did well to keep his nose out of the first corner incident that took out several cars including his teammate Pedro De La Rosa.

“It was a crazy sight at the start, I arrived at the first corner looking at several cars spinning around, across and pretty much everywhere else”, he exclaimed.
With rain forecast during the race, the team decided to gamble on a different tyre strategy and decided to continue the Indian on the super-soft instead of switching to the soft, in case the rain came.

“From the get-go we knew we had to keep a consistent pace, stay out of trouble and finish the race and with a chance of rain we decided to try a different strategy.”

But the rain finally didn’t appear and with the regulations demanding all drivers to use both dry compounds in a dry race, it backfired as the Indian had to pit just two laps from the finish to switch to the soft tyre.

“In hindsight we could’ve run a normal one-stop race like everyone else, but had the rain come, our call would have paid off.

“But this is racing, you take a few risks and sometimes it doesn’t work out. But we still got a great result for the team, best of the season by far.

“It has come on the back of the disastrous Barcelona outing so I am pretty satisfied.”

He also reckoned that the track with lack of high-speed corners had helped the team to close the gap to the front-runners.

“We were closer this time, in terms of one-lap and race pace compared to any other race this far – because aerodynamics does not play as big a role here.
“We brought some rear-suspension upgrades too and they seemed to work well.”

But there is no rest now as Formula 1 packs up and crosses the Atlantic for the Canadian GP scheduled on 8-10 June.

“We need to carry this momentum into the season now – Canada was a good result for me last year – it usually throws up surprises with the weather and everything so I am looking forward to it”, he said. (IANS)