» Trulli admits the established teams are out of Lotus’ reach

Jarno Trulli has admitted that Lotus has a long road ahead of it if it wants to compete with the established F1 teams on the grid in the first four flyaway races of the season.

Jarno completed his final pre-season outing for the team at Barcelona, ending the day ninth-quickest but some 4.3 seconds slower than the leading time of Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes GP.

After experiencing some reliability issues (including a power steering failure) on Friday, Jarno was pleased to rack up over 100 laps on this outing.

But he admitted that he expects Lotus to be at the back of the pack in the opening races.

“I’m always confident,” Jarno said. “But it would have obviously been better to have had a couple weeks more of preparation for the whole team, given the fact that we came in really late and the car was ready really late, we can’t say that we’re ready. But we will be there, we’ll definitely race and we’ll be professional. We’re looking good but definitely the car is not there yet. We’ve got a lot of pieces and parts coming up which will make our car much quicker but probably for the first four races we’ll have to cope with what we have.

"We are ready to race, but I can’t say we are ready to fight. Maybe with Virgin, but the rest are out of reach at the moment."

[Image via ITV-F1]