HRT's Karthikeyan posts 15th place finish at Monaco GP

Coming into the sixth round of the 2012 FIA F1 championship, the team's best finish had been a 19th place at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Starting 22nd on the grid, Karthikeyan did well to keep his nose out of the first corner incident that took out several cars including his teammate Pedro De La Rosa.

"It was a crazy sight at the start, I arrived at the first corner looking at several cars spinning around, across and pretty much everywhere else," he exclaimed.

With rain forecast during the race, the team decided to gamble on a different tyre strategy and decided to continue the Indian on the super-soft instead of switching to the soft, in case the rain came.

 

"From the get-go we knew we had to keep a consistent pace, stay out of trouble and finish the race and with a chance of rain we decided to try a different strategy," he said.

But the rain finally didn't appear and with the regulations demanding all drivers to use both dry compounds in a dry race, it backfired as the Indian had to pit just two laps from the finish to switch to the soft tyre.

"In hindsight we could've run a normal one-stop race like everyone else, but had the rain come, our call would have paid off.

"But this is racing, you take a few risks and sometimes it doesn't work out. But we still got a great result for the team, best of the season by far. It has come on the back of the disastrous Barcelona outing so I am pretty satisfied." MORE