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Lotus have genuine pace - Gascoyne

Lotus endured a tough weekend in Melbourne, with Heikki Kovalainen retiring from the race and Jarno Trulli finishing two laps down © Sutton Images

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• Drivers:
• Heikki Kovalainen
• |
• Jarno Trulli

• Teams:
• Team Lotus

Mike Gascoyne insists that Lotus have got the car to challenge the midfield, despite being well off the pace at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Lotus had said that its T128 would move the team in to the midfield pack this season, and testing times seemed to indicate that it had made significant progress over the winter. But having qualified over two seconds behind the next quickest car in Melbourne, observers had questioned whether the team had been showboating during testing. Gascoyne, however, vehemently denied the accusations.

"Utter nonsense," he told Auto Motor und Sport. "The last day in Barcelona was a race simulation, so why would we lie to ourselves?"

Gascoyne said that the reason for the lack of performance was due to the team being unable to get the new Pirelli tyres to work properly in the cooler temperatures, and was more confident for this weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix.

"With the hard and the soft tyres we were well below the average temperatures of all the other cars in the field," he said. "The conditions at Sepang should suit us more favourably. I think the track temperatures will help us show more of the car's true pace and as the layout it is quite similar to Barcelona - relatively high aero and a good mix of low and high speed turns - I think we will be able to extract more performance from the car than we were able to in Melbourne."

Jarno Trulli shared Gascoyne's optimism, saying he was hopeful of delivering an improved performance at the Malaysian-owned team's home race.

"We believe that the package we have can help us have a good weekend in Malaysia and I am really looking forward to seeing how the car responds in the heat," Trulli said. "In a perfect world we would be able to do something amazing in front of our home fans, but let's see. It's still early days for us, and while we are clearly closer to the midfield teams than we were a year ago we still have some time to make up."

Heikki Kovalainen said he was focussing on his own performance as much as that of the car, with the Malaysian race one of the most demanding of the season for the drivers.

"Physically it's one of the toughest races," Kovalainen said. "It's something we start preparing for immediately after Australia. I arrived in Malaysia immediately after Melbourne and I started preparing the hydration and working with my nutritionist to prepare for the race itself. If you prepare properly it's no issue. I'm looking forward to it - I enjoy be¬ing in the heat and I'm not distracted by it at all."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.