Lopez: “Kubica deserves a World Championship”

Robert Kubica has been one of the stars of the season so far

Renault F1 shareholder and Genii Group boss Gerard Lopez says that Robert Kubica has what it takes to be a World Champion one day.

After a low-key 2009 with BMW the Pole’s reputation has been boosted by some great performances with Renault so far this year, and he has scored a second, a third and a fifth in the last three races. He continues to be linked with a future at Ferrari.

“I knew Robert from BMW, even before he was an F1 [race] driver there,” Lopez told this blog. “I’m a very strong believer that on pure speed and character he’s one of the few that deserves a World Championship at some time.”

Kubica had another great race in China, running third for many laps before slipping back to fifth. His team mate Vitaly Petrov was also in the points after both men joined Nico Rosberg and Jenson Button in staying out on dry tyres in the early laps.

“It was a good race for us,” said Lopez. “The basis was the fact that again the team made no mistakes, and made the right decisions, and they’ve been doing that since the beginning of the season.

“I’m pleased with Vitaly, and how he recovered from a rookie mistake, when he spun out. Rain is a great leveller, and rain tells you a lot about drivers, because it levels the playing field much more. So the job he did was amazing in rain conditions.”

Lopez says that Renault needs to improve its qualifying pace in the coming weeks.

“In qualifying Robert is pretty much where we are supposed to be right now, between sixth and eighth probably, with Vitaly scratching around for 10^th, which is great for a rookie obviously. In the races we’re better. The car is where we expected in the races, and we’re working very hard to get it up to speed in qualifying.

“After we took over the team we worked extremely hard on development.  We’re bringing out a package pretty much every race, so it’s a very aggressive development schedule. Obviously if you remember at the last test in Barcelona [in February] we were not brilliant, but we had a major upgrade and the car was different for Bahrain. So the car is obviously good.

“For Barcelona we’ve new bits on the car, but obviously it’s a big Grand Prix for all the other teams, so there are going to be major updates. Hopefully we’ll catch up, but we’ll see. It’s going to tell us where we stand and then we’ll take it from there.”