After a two-car finish in Spain and much promise for Monaco, Virgin were brought back down to earth as reliability problems returned to haunt the team. This was hardly a surprise as reliability issues have haunted them all season and it would be a foolish man who would spend their money on online betting predicting that it won’t happen again in 2010.

Both cars had a mechanical problem which is obviously a big step back from last week and this has shown that their new revised car is still not reliable.

Timo Glock, in their revised car, only managed 22 laps until a rear suspension failure cut his day disappointingly short. But during the race he did enjoy some success over taking the Lotus of Jarno Trulli and keeping up with the pace of the quicker Heikki Kovalainen. Unfortunately he couldn’t keep it up and investigations will go ahead to find the cause of the suspension problems.

Lucas di Grassi in the original car faired a bit better completing 25 laps until he experienced a problem with his wheel on his out lap after a routine pit stop. During the race, he did manage to restrain the prancing horse of two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso with some confident driving, but the car just wasn’t quick enough.

This was obviously a difficult debut Monaco Grand Prix for the team which ended in disappointment, but team principle John Booth believes they can still take a lot of positives away from it. He said:

“A disappointing end to our first Monaco Grand Prix, but we take a lot of positives away from the early party of the weekend, where we saw positive steps operationally and with the new car.

“The team have done a terrific job during two challenging back to back races, so it is frustrating that we were unable to achieve a better reward for them today. We will go to Turkey with the second revised VR-01 where it will help us enormously to be running the same specification of car on both sides of the garage.”

Lucas di Grassi will therefore be available to race in the same car as his team-mate in Turkey and we will finally be able to see how much they have improved both cars. But what they really want is an improvement in reliability as once again this put an end to their race and if they never finish a race, they will never have a chance of getting any points this season.

They continue to battle the other new teams and they are comfortably better than the Hispania team, but have been out done by the Lotus on numerous occasions. Now they go on to Turkey to see who will reign as the ‘best of the rest’.

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