Virgin hoping that they’ve finally solved their reliability issues
The Virgin team are confident that they have solved the reliability issues that meant that their car hasn’t run for more than 18 laps or so yet. This means that they have addressed the hydraulic problems that they have had since the launch of the car and the transmission problems that they had at Sakhir.
Virgin impressed at Bahrain by qualifying fastest of all the new teams and then disappointed on race day by not managing to make the first set of stops. The hydraulic issues that put out one of their cars out in Bahrain seems the same as the one that they claimed to have solved after the pre-season testing where they had these issues – it seems that the fix didn’t work and they now have a ‘robust’ solution to the problem, let’s hope that’s true.
They also had transmission issues in Bahrain and these would seem separate from the other issues they’ve had but as hydraulics drive everything in the car it could be the same root cause. The team have used the terms issues and problems though – note the plural – so it seems that they have had separate issues to work on. They seem convinced that they’ve solved them so it seems nothing is standing in their way in Australia.
The race team itself would have also learnt a lot over the first weekend and should be a much smoother operation which will help the cars during practice and qualifying – they have yet to feature much in the race. This will help the drivers no end in setting up the cars on the green Albert Park track.
As a new team that has very little data on the circuits that it is travelling to setup is always going to be elusive – they have hardly any starting points and it will be hard to know what to optimise – here the responsibility will fall heavily on Timo Glock to find that sweet spot to give them that edge over the other new teams. Lotus will be trying to do the same though and they have two experienced drivers to help find it.
If Virgin really can finish the race it will be great to see the battle joined with the new teams, chances are that they are going to score a point at some point in the season but you’ve got to be there at the end to have a chance – hopefully Virgin give themselves that chance.
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