Sepang, Malaysia: Indian F1 driver Narain Karthikeyan brought home his HRT F1 team to its first race finish of the 2012 season here at an incident-filled Malaysian Grand Prix.

It was an inspired call on the part of the Spanish squad who chose to start the race on full-wets while most of the field was on intermediates. The team was counting on the fact that the rain shower which came in minutes before the lights went out, would intensify later in the race.
The call turned out to be the right one as most of the grid trooped into the pits after the opening laps, Karthikeyan was able to stay out without having to pit – quickly moving into 10th position while torrential rain hit the circuit.

“We were on the right compound yes but the rain was absolutely relentless. I saw cars going off around me and told myself to keep out of trouble. It was so difficult out there, especially the last sector it was like floating more driving. So it was very easy to screw up and throw it away.”

Given the conditions, the officials deemed it was far too hostile to continue racing and the safety car was deployed on the eighth lap. Two laps later, the race was suspended and the cars were back to the grid with Karthikeyan having made his way up to tenth.

It was a long wait for the Indian on the grid, and sitting in tenth spot on the grid, a barrage of thoughts were invading his head.
“It was a long way up from where we normally expect to be, so obviously I was elated at that point and hoping to hold on to it for a little longer.Realistically I was well aware that it wouldn’t be possible under normal circumstances.

“However, I wasn’t praying for the race to be aborted – contrary to what most would think although it would have given me half a point (chuckles).
There was sufficient light so I knew we would get on with it sooner or later.”

The race was restarted over 50 minutes later, but the field circulated behind the safety car for another four laps before racing was resumed.
There was an immediate rush of cars piling into the pitlane to switch to intermediate tyres, but Karthikeyan elected to stay out another lap, moving up to eighth place on lap 14.

On the following lap though, McLaren’s Jenson Button made a mistake trying to pass the Indian into the turn 9 hairpin. The Briton misjudged the manoeuvre and clipped the back of the HRT as a result. Jenson lost his front wing in the process while Karthikeyan, who was pushing hard as it was his in-lap for a switch to the intermediates, lost time as well.

“Well, there isn’t much I can say really – Jenson went a little too deep I guess and for my part I felt a sharp impact at the exit. It was only a tap yes but it took a few seconds to confirm there was no damage and get back to pushing 100 percent.
“We weren’t on the right tyre for those conditions so I was just trying to get to the pits as quickly as possible to reduce the time loss.”
However, the performance of the car was left exposed once the track started drying out as the midfield competition was much quicker under normal conditions.

“Rain is a leveller – the car’s disadvantage becomes less of a factor in difficult conditions so we exploited that while we could. But once the track started drying out, given the performance of our car, losing positions was inevitable.”
A strong stint on the intermediates though saw him keep his experienced teammate Pedro De La Rosa behind, and then it was time to switch to the slick tyre as the track dried rapidly.

On lap 39 Karthikeyan pitted and decided to switch to the hard tyre instead of the more favoured medium compound as he had been unable to find significant performance gains from the softer tyre throughout the weekend.

“The car was working well on the hard tyre;and it had the ideal working range at that point so we felt it was the right choice.It would also allow us to run to the end of the race without the tyres falling off.

“Later we saw Perez using the same strategy to good effect so it was the right call.”
The race was progressing well until lap 47 saw Sebastian Vettel tagging the HRT at the exit of turn 8 while trying to lap him.

“I saw him, gave him space but I was over the kerbs, which were wet so I had to go right to keep the car on track. But he cut back across before overtaking my car completely, so my front wing punctured his rear left.

“It was just one of those unnecessary incidents.”

Karthikeyan crossed the line in 21st place, ahead of his teammate Pedro De La Rosa in 22nd – marking the first finish for the Spanish squad this year.

“I was expecting it to be much tougher but it was great teamwork – considering things like pit stops which the crew has never done before in a race. So there is a lot of potential for improvement there as well.

“On the track, the rain helped our position initially, but more importantly it kept most reliability issues away as the temperature was relatively lower compared to Friday and Saturday.

Despite the encouraging finish, the Indian concedes that the team is still far from where it needs to be and a lot of effort is required to get there.

“While getting to the finish is promising, we need to do a lot of work to extract more speed from the car, as in terms of pure pace we’re still about 1-1.5 seconds away from our immediate rivals.

“We may have been conservative in engine terms and so on due to reliability worries but we need to use the time we have before China and take the next step in performance and show some solid progress there.”

The Chinese Grand Prix, Round 3 of the FIA Formula 1 Championship is scheduled for April 13-15, 2012.