'Targeting 10th place in the championship'

Valencia: HRT team principal Colin Kolles is absolutely determined about achieving his target for the 2011 season.

"The target is to finish 10th in the championship. Everyone in the team, including the Carabante family, the engineers, the drivers know what we want to achieve,” Kolles said in an exclusive interview with ibnlive.com in Valencia.

Kolles was referring to beating the other two bottom-placed teams - Team Lotus and Virgin Racing - who, like the Spanish team, have failed to score any points so far.

The German, however, acknowledged that reaching the 10th position is not going to be easy. While HRT have been able to match the pace of Virgin cars quite consistently, competing with Team Lotus is a different proposition altogether.

"We have to work really hard. We still have to make a lot of progress to match Team Lotus," Kolles said. He. however, added that it's just not about pace alone.

"We have to achieve the best possible result at the end of the day," he said.

He, however, maintained that under normal circumstances, had everything gone in the right direction in the winter session, they would have been able to compete with Team Lotus by now.

Though the team had a tough weekend in Valencia, Kolles was encouraged by the results in Canada two weeks ago.

"It was encouraging in terms of qualifying because we out-qualified the Virgins. The drivers did not do too many big mistakes. The conditions were very difficult.

"We finished the race with very good results (13th and 14th places for Liuzzi and Narain). Narain got a penalty with which we don´t necessarily agree but we have to respect it.

"All in all. it was very positive as we moved up in the championship positions and this is what counts at the end of the day,” he said.

Speaking about the season so far, Kolles said it was obvious that the team had made a lot of progress.

"I think we are the only team that made improvement in terms of seconds (time) from the start of the season. It has been positive," he said.

"We struggled in Australia for different reasons. I think it's obvious we have taken a step forward. We are not last in the championship. We tried to improve race by race and achieve 10th position in the championship," he said.