John Booth pleased with Marussia progress

After three races of the 2012 season, Marussia Team Principal John Booth is already very satisfied with the progress his team have made. The Anglo-Russian outfit made a late start to the season, as they were one of only two teams along with HRT to not bring their new car to any of the pre-season tests at Jerez or Barcelona.

However, unlike HRT who were unable to qualify for the season opener in Australia, Marussia have successfully been able to qualify for every race so far this season. Not only have Marussia qualified for every race this season, they have finished every race this season as well (Pic did retire from oil pressure issues in Australia, but was classified nonetheless after completing 90% race distance).

“Going into last weekend’s race in China we’d eaten into the gap to our immediate competitors by 0.8s since Malaysia.” Explained Marussia Team Principal, John Booth. “Combined with the 0.6s decrease we’d seen between the first two races, that means we’ve found almost 1.5s of lap time in the first three races which, considering the challenges we faced with our late start, is very pleasing to all of us. It is still very early in the season of course, but it is nice to see that we are heading in a good development direction.”

Timo Glock started the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix from the front row of the grid for Toyota, alongside his then team-mate Jarno Trulli. The German therefore has good memories of the circuit, and will be confident heading into round four of the Championship. Frenchman Charles Pic will be confident heading to Bahrain as well, as the rookie begins to race on circuits he is familiar with from his GP2 days. Pic won on the circuit in 2010 in the GP2 Asia Series for Arden International, and will undoubtedly be glad to begin racing on tracks he knows.

Marussia made their debut at Sakhir in 2010 (known then as Virgin Racing), with Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi at the wheel. Unfortunately both cars’ retired during the race, and Marussia will be hoping history does not repeat itself this coming weekend.

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