Timo Glock says he is happy with the progress Marussia are making during the early races after missing out on pre-season testing.
German says gap is closing to rivals
Timo Glock says he is happy with the progress Marussia are making during the early races of the season and hopes they can use it as a baseline to catch their nearest rivals.
Although Marussia's new MR01 chassis failed to turn a wheel in any of the official pre-season tests, they have still managed to close the gap to Caterham, with Glock qualifying around 0.6 seconds behind Vitaly Petrov in China having been almost two seconds down in Melbourne last month.
Part of the reason for the improvement stems from a number of small aerodynamic improvements the team have introduced, with much-needed time in the car for both Glock and team-mate Charles Pic also accelerating their development.
Speaking at the Bahrain Grand Prix on Thursday, Glock said: "I think if you do 200km of testing before the first race, every lap, every kilometre you do is like a learning process for us at the moment. But I'm quite happy with the past races, it seems we've closed the gap quite significantly.
"Last qualifying we were three seconds behind (the polesitter); the first race we were five and a half seconds, so I think there's a clear step forward that's good."
Progress
Marussia have also been buoyed by the sector times they set in Shanghai in comparison to Caterham, with only the latter outfit's KERS making a difference in the final sector which features the long straight.
"I hope we can continue like this in terms of improvements. But it will be difficult in the European season - everyone comes with new updates, so we just have to work hard and continue the progress that we're doing at the moment," Glock said.
"It would be great to have every race with the step that we had in China. So we have to see what we can do. We have some little parts here which could improve the car again. So I'm looking forward to it and I think we have a good baseline to really catch up."
Glock also said that Marussia hoped to introduce a major upgrade themselves in time for the Spanish Grand Prix next month.
"We're working on it," the German added. "It's not definitely how much we will get out of it but at the moment, the way we're getting new parts every race, if that continues I don't care how big the update is in Barcelona.
"If we can keep it up through the whole year, that's more important."
