VITALY PETROV AND BRUNO SENNA LEAVE THE YAS

Yesterday’s race at the Yas Marina Circuit resulted in a disappointing performance from Lotus Renault GP - Vitaly finished in P13 with Bruno three places below in P16…

Bruno Senna, Lotus Renault GP

Photo by: xpb.cc

How would you summarise your performance in Abu Dhabi?

BS: Let’s be honest here – there’s not a crumb of comfort to take from that performance. We suffered from a KERS failure, drive through penalty and a car which was not on the money at this particular track. Put those together and you see why I finished where I did.
VP: It was quite a frustrating afternoon because my DRS was not working. We thought we could have a good fight with the cars in front, but we were pretty helpless, so we decided to change the strategy.

Tell us about the pit stop…

BS: There was lots of lost time to make up and, strategically, we took a gamble that didn’t pay off…
VP: When I first stopped, we put fresh medium tyres on but unfortunately these did not last long enough so we returned to the pits on lap 38 to change to the soft – unfortunately that ended up being too slow.

So, how was the R31’s pace?

BS: I certainly think that overall this weekend my pace was as good as it could have been.
VP: The pace was not good enough to score points and that’s the reality.

Looking ahead to Brazil - what are your thoughts?

BS: Maybe for Brazil we will have a better baseline, and let’s hope we have a better race weekend.
VP: I’m looking forward to it; it’s the last race. To be honest, I already want to have the last race and to think about 2012 as soon as possible. Looking at Brazil, I think the race there will be interesting. The weather is normally a little bit unpredictable, so anything can happen there and hopefully with a possibility to fight for points again. It will be all eyes to Brazil to try and finish the season on a high…