Racing Point’s Andrew Green says he thinks other teams haven’t done as good a job on their 2020 cars as they should have.
Racing Point enter the 2020 season appearing to be the quickest of the midfield teams, having been consistently strong through pre-season testing.
However, their RP20 design has resulted in some under-the-breath muttering from rival teams, due to the car bearing a close resemblance to last year’s championship winning Mercedes W10 – Racing Point’s power unit supplier. However, technical director Andrew Green says he doesn’t agree with any of the complaints being made by other teams: “I don’t know what they’ve got to complain about because what we have done is completely legal.”
“What we’re doing is racing with the rules that were written which I think is the idea of the game really. Given a set of rules, you go as fast as you can…that’s what we’re doing.
“If other teams haven’t taken the route we’ve taken for reasons unknown to us, thats their decision. They had the opportunity to do exactly what we did. They elected not to, for reasons I don’t know. Something we’ve been wanting to do for a very long time and haven’t had the budget to do.”
“This was a natural thing for us to do, absolutely 100%.” continued Green. “It gives me encouragement that people are talking about us, people are complaining about us. That is a good indication to me that we are doing something really good. If we are at the bottom of the pack, no one will be mentioning what we have done at all.”
Directing his attention to some of the other teams, Green said some of them should be taking a long, hard look at themselves and their own shortcomings heading into 2020: “It boils down to the fact that some of the teams may have not done as good a job as they should have done. I think they’ll probably be seeing that.”
Racing Point’s financial future has been secured since the takeover of Force India by Lawrence Stroll’s consortium, and Green pointed out the team were capable of big results even without secure funding: “We’re a team that finished 4th 2 year on the trot with next to no money at all. We were absolutely hand to mouth and we finished 4th in the championship. We beat a team like McLaren.”
“For people to think you have a team like that, inject money and resources into it and it wasn’t going to improve, they are just naive. I think they just haven’t stepped up the plate. I think a lot of their frustration is probably looking inwards and going ‘crikey we haven’t done a very good job’. Thats what I’d be thinking if I was looking from the outside in. I’d be looking at my own department going ‘C’mon guys, what are we playing at?’
