{"id":16689,"date":"2012-09-29T09:09:23","date_gmt":"2012-09-29T13:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=16689"},"modified":"2012-09-29T09:09:23","modified_gmt":"2012-09-29T13:09:23","slug":"nationality-played-against-di-resta-for-mclaren-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/nationality-played-against-di-resta-for-mclaren-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Nationality played against di Resta for McLaren seat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fellow Scot David Coulthard thinks Paul di Resta could still be a contender for a top seat in 2012.<\/p>\n

\"Paul-Di-Resta-2\"Coulthard, the former long-time McLaren driver, believes his former team “looked at” Force India’s di Resta as a possible replacement for the departing Lewis Hamilton.<\/p>\n

But even though McLaren made much of their all-British driver pairing of Hamilton alongside Jenson Button since 2010, Coulthard thinks di Resta’s nationality actually played against him.<\/p>\n

“My feeling is they (McLaren) had shaken the British tree as much as they could sponsor-wise and Perez, quite apart from his undoubted ability behind a wheel, offered something different in that respect,” he wrote in a column for the Telegraph.<\/p>\n

Coulthard is probably referring to rumours Sergio Perez – Hamilton’s actual 2013 successor – could eventually bring his backer Telmex and other Mexican pesos to McLaren to replace wavering title sponsor Vodafone.<\/p>\n

McLaren team boss Martin Whitmarsh confirmed di Resta was considered for the seat.<\/p>\n

“I know Paul very well and the true answer is that I rate him but it would probably have been continuing a little bit too much with the British theme to have gone that route,” he said.<\/p>\n

But what about Ferrari?\u00a0 Even though Felipe Massa seems set for another season in red, Coulthard thinks di Resta is still a contender.<\/p>\n

“Why not?” he said.\u00a0 “I’m biased but I feel Paul is the obvious choice.”<\/p>\n

\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fellow Scot David Coulthard thinks Paul di Resta could still be a contender for a top seat in 2012. Coulthard, the former long-time McLaren driver, believes his former team “looked at” Force India’s di Resta as a possible replacement for the departing Lewis Hamilton. But even though McLaren made much of their all-British driver pairing …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[410,5262,5340,154,491,5284,323,1952,2289],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16691,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16689\/revisions\/16691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}