Pastor Maldonado is looking forward to a major power boost at Hockenheim next weekend.<\/p>\n
The 2012 Spanish grand prix winner, who chose to race the number ’13’ this year and beyond, has had a dire campaign since switching from Williams to Lotus over the winter.<\/p>\n
Along with Sauber and the backmarkers, the Venezuelan is yet to score a solitary point this year as the Enstone based team grapple with poor pace and reliability.<\/p>\n
But things could be about to get better.<\/p>\n
Speed Week reports that Maldonado has been using struggling engine supplier Renault’s older engine specification.<\/p>\n
But at the Silverstone test this week, he finally got a taste of the updated V6 unit, marvelling: “It felt as if I suddenly had two engines in the car.<\/p>\n
“Based on the data we have, the difference between the old and the new engine specification is 60 horse power,” he exclaimed.<\/p>\n
According to world champion Sebastian Vettel, however, Maldonado might be wrong to set his sights too high.<\/p>\n
Red Bull has been at the cutting edge of Renault’s efforts to up its game in 2014 after a disastrous winter, but Vettel says the gap to Mercedes has stayed the same.<\/p>\n
“Right now the gap is very big and we haven’t really closed the gap since race one,” the German told Britain’s Sky.<\/p>\n
“Obviously we have tried lots of stuff to improve, but they (Mercedes) are doing the same thing.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pastor Maldonado is looking forward to a major power boost at Hockenheim next weekend. The 2012 Spanish grand prix winner, who chose to race the number ’13’ this year and beyond, has had a dire campaign since switching from Williams to Lotus over the winter. Along with Sauber and the backmarkers, the Venezuelan is yet …<\/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":[5262,5340,1842],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22530"}],"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=22530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22531,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22530\/revisions\/22531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}