Formula One News » Rosberg: Mercedes needs to improve to end year strongly Posted on 04/09/2010
Mercedes Grand Prix man Nico Rosberg has said the Brackley-based outfit will ‘struggle’ to get another podium this season.
Rosberg finished sixth in Belgium last weekend, despite picking up a five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change and only starting fourteenth.
However despite what was a great result in the circumstances, Rosberg is not happy with his MGP W01 and he believes the squad will be hard pushed now to repeated the rostrum results he managed in Britain, Malaysia and China, unless they get lucky.
“It’s definitely becoming more and more difficult because on pure pace we’re going to struggle to get a podium I think,” Rosberg told itvf1.com.
“But the team is continuing to work and we are still bringing improvements. A lot of them are because we need to try and get them to work properly for next year, which is also important. So it helps this year – and next year.
“But there’s always still going to be opportunities [too]: we have some great races coming up. There’s tracks like Singapore where there’s always going to be exciting races and a lot of things can happen. So it’s still a possibility definitely.”
Meanwhile, speaking after last weekend’s race, and after scoring points for the eleventh time this year, Rosberg urged Mercedes to keep improving the car so they can end the 2010 season strongly.
“My rain set-up finally worked out towards the end [at Spa] and I made up two places on the re-start [passing my team-mate, Michael Schumacher and Kamui Kobayashi]. Sixth place is okay and it really is the most that we could have hoped for from this weekend,” he continued.
“Michael and I had a couple of battles out there which was fun. We respect each other and you just have to be careful and it all worked out okay.
“It was a good recovery but we really need to continue to try and improve our car to have a stronger end to the season.”
Mercedes boss Norbert Haug added: “It is obvious that we are still lacking speed but this was a much better result than in the previous two races where we didn’t perform as well as we did with Nico’s podium finish at Silverstone.
“We are now looking forward to Monza which will be a very special race due to the unique high-speed nature of this circuit. Thank you to everybody in the team for the recovery after qualifying.
“These points show that never giving up and being measured and focused are always the right things to do,” he concluded.
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