For the second race in a row Hispania have managed to get to the chequered flag, however this time both drivers made it home.

Although Chandhok and Senna being three and four laps down respectively, the team won’t care much about that as they strive for reliability in this early stage of the season as indicated by Bruno Senna’s comments after the race.

“I am really pleased for the team to have finished the race with both cars – it has been another positive weekend for the team, taking a good step forward.”

Before the race I predicted that, with Virgin’s fuel tank being too small, Hispania could have a chance to finish ahead of Richard Branson’s team.

However the team’s lack of speed showed throughout the weekend with neither driver being able to get within a second of the other new teams, except in qualifying where the rain allowed Chandhok to get off the back row for the first time all season in place of Lucas Di Grassi’s Virgin.

The long straights and sweeping curves at Sepang seemed to show up the car’s aerodynamic deficiencies which left Chandhok and Senna being within a few tenths of each other and nobody else.

However this is something the team has noted. After their 100% reliable run on Friday’s practice team boss Colin Kolles said:

“Technically everything worked well and this is very positive for the team to be running through a normal driving programme with a crew that worked very hard to make all of this happen.

“Now we need to go beyond and improve driveability of the car.”

This weekend also saw Chandhok out qualify Senna for the first time this season and finish ahead of Brazilian in the race too, with his fastest lap being over half a second quicker. If you had to compare the two drivers you would say that overall Chandhok had the better weekend of the two with his faster qualifying lap and having better race pace too.

Away from the track though were was one dark note to come out of the weekend was the criticism of the Dallara designed car by Hispania’s technical consultant, Geoff Willis.

“Frankly I’m disappointed. I was expecting better.  There a lot of reasons why this design has been compromised, not least because the programme was stopped and started, stopped and started. So there’s quite a lot of corners that were cut in the last few weeks to get to Bahrain.

“I’m not particularly interested in staying with a car that’s at the back of the grid. I’m interested in making cars go faster and manage the whole thing.”

Whether that’s a threat that he means or not remains to be seen.

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