Rubens Barrichello has returned fire on sections of the media who reported that he derisively likened his Williams FW32 – and the Virgin Racing VR-01 of his compatriot Lucas di Grassi – as “porcarias”.
In his native Portuguese tongue, the obscenity can be roughly translated to “piece of junk” or even “crap”.
After making it into the top-ten shoot-out for the first time, F1’s most-capped driver used his wet-weather skills to his full ability to line up in 7th place. On a dry track for Sunday’s race, his FW32 simply did not have the pace to maintain its qualifying form and he tumbled through the field to finish a lap down in 12th place.
Di Grassi finished a race for the first time this season, 3 laps adrift and comfortably the best driver of the three rookie teams, but his finish only came about via a bit of clever fuel management when the all-too-small VR-01 started to run dry.
"After the race I joked during a press conference with di Grassi that we needed to greatly improve our ‘porcarias‘ to catch up with the new championship leader and our friend Massinha [Felipe Massa]," Barrichello clarified.
"It was totally [in] fun and everyone who was there felt it in exactly the same way. But some others said I had spoken badly of my team.
"While people in his country [India] look on the bright side and applaud Karun Chandhok for finishing 15th, some Brazilians insist on looking at things the other way," he added.
A back-handed compliment about Karun if ever I’ve read one!
Richard Bailey
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