Pastor Maldonado insists that he remains as motivated as ever despite a difficult start to the season.
The Venezuelan driver has failed to score any points in the opening seven races, and he currently sits bottom of the drivers’ standings behind the Marussia and Caterham drivers. Nevertheless, he is still hopeful of securing his first top ten finish in the next few races as Formula 1 returns to Europe.
“I am very motivated,” Maldonado said. “I think we have some good weekends ahead of us and there are still so many races to go. The European part of the season is very important for us, so let’s push hard, do our best and for sure we will be in the points soon.
“We all know what we have to do and we are all pushing hard. Yes, we can all get frustrated, but ultimately we all want to achieve success so we remain positive. We can see how much improvement there has been with pace from the car and once we have all the reliability issues sorted we’ll be regularly fighting for points.
“Once we’re there, the next target is to fight for more points and then podiums. We’ve seen that the Mercedes are not perfect and can be beaten. Even they had reliability issues in Canada.”
Maldonado had made a good start in Canada and was running inside the top ten before a problem on his car forced him to retire from the race. Heading to Austria – which returns to F1 after eleven years away – the Lotus driver believes that the Red Bull Ring circuit could suit the E22 car.
“I think it should be quite good for the E22,” he explained. “It looks like the circuit doesn’t have too many low speed corners and the downforce and set-up is similar to Barcelona, which should help us.
“We will work hard to solve the problems we had in Canada so that we can reach our targets in Austria. I’m certainly optimistic Austria will suit us better than the last two rounds.”