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Kovalainen sees himself staying at Caterham

Heikki Kovalainen: "I can very well see myself carrying on a lot longer here" © Sutton Images

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Heikki Kovalainen insists he is not looking to leave Caterham any time soon and is keen to extend his contract if the team continues to make progress.

Kovalainen joined Caterham, then known as Lotus Racing, in its first year in 2010 after a stint at McLaren alongside Lewis Hamilton. Of the three new teams joining F1 in 2010, Caterham has scored the best results, but has yet to score a point. Despite going from a race-winning car to a back marker, Kovalainen says he is not getting itchy feet.

"My focus is wholly with Caterham F1 at the moment, and if we keep progressing as we have done over the past two years, and into this third year, then I can very well see myself carrying on a lot longer here," he told Caterham's online magazine Notes. "There are a lot of things that I value very highly at Caterham. I've managed to be here since the beginning. I've gotten to know everyone very well. I have a very good position with the team and it's working very well. So, these are all questions that, if you go to another team, would have to be answered again. If you go to another team, you have to build all that again. So it's not as simple as just going from one place to another.

"Overall, these two years, and hopefully this year as well, have been a really great time for my career, in rebuilding and finding form again and I'm grateful to Caterham and everyone in the team for that. At the moment though, I think the focus for me has to be developing this car and finding the right set-up directions for it, so we can get the results we are targeting. The future, beyond that, can wait. So, for people who want to speculate, it's not the right time to be talking about it and I'm not discussing anything with anyone!"

Kovalainen has recently signed a new management deal with IMG, the same company that manages sports stars such as Rafael Nadal and Danica Patrick, but he said it was purely to allow him to focus more on his driving.

"The main impetus behind the IMG deal happening was two-fold really," he said. "First, I wanted to spend more time with the team and the engineers and not worry about other elements of my career, I wanted to leave that to someone else. Also, my girlfriend, Catherine, has been helping me with a lot of things, working with the team and organising travels and things like that and she wanted to do something else, so we thought that we needed to get those things sorted.

"We looked at the all the options, I met the guys at IMG and the details were all sorted out quite quickly. Basically, they are the partners I'm looking for. The deal will help me spend even more time with the team and it allows me to focus on the racing. They are more professional at looking at all the stuff that goes on around a Formula One driver, the stuff outside the cockpit. So I think it will be a big boost for me and hopefully we will see even better performances on the track."

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