Rosberg shares the sentiments about the Ardennes circuit as his rivals, and is keen to maintain his recent run of form.
"I’m not overly optimistic, but we’ve clearly made progress since the test [at Spa] and I hope we can keep that momentum going," he said, "As we’ve shown in the past few races, we’ve delivered over and above our expectations, so I hope that we can continue that form and exceed our targets this weekend."
Scuderia Toro Rosso – Vitantonio Liuzzi (#18), Sebastian Vettel (#19):
One of only two teams yet to score this season, Scuderia Toro Rosso heads to Spa hoping that the unpredictable nature of the circuit, and its associated microclimate, can help it open its account.
Sebastian Vettel will be hoping the final stop on the European calendar will yield a more favourable result after a promising qualifying performance at Monza was undone by a disappointing race result.
Nonetheless, Spa is a circuit the German knows somewhat better than those he has recently competed on and will be hoping the added experience – the only ingredient missing from what many consider a complete package – will help him show well in a car that appears more under-developed as the season progresses.
For Vitantonio Liuzzi, the race will signal another chance for him to try and impress prospective employees before he is left fighting for a place on the
F1 grid at the end of the season.
Spyker F1 – Sakon Yamamoto(#20), Adrian Sutil (#21):
THe other team still pointless with four races to run is Spyker and, amid further rumours of another change of ownership, the Silverstone-based team heads to Belgium for the second outing with its B-spec car.
Pleased to have got two cars got to the finish in last week’s Italian Grand Prix, Spyker is aware that the unique low downforce package required at the Italian track made it hard to quantify how much progress has been made over the previous A-spec machine. The Belgian GP at Spa should provide a much better guide to the team’s form, with chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne looking forward to being ablke to make a real comparison between new and old.
"I think most of the gain comes from aero and, at Monza, you’re just taking all the wing off and running it with no downforce, so you don’t really see the benefits," he explained, "We’ve got some improvements for Spa, including some updates coming on the diffuser, so we always said that this was just the start of the process. It is moving forward, and Spa will be better.
"Monza was a bit of a mixed bag, there were good and bad bits. I was disappointed with qualifying. All year we’ve struggled to get one lap out of the car, and last weekend was no exception. I think we felt there was quite a bit more in the car than we got out in qualifying, and I think our race pace and Friday pace confirmed that. In fact, our race pace was more competitive than we’ve been all year.
"Getting two cars to the finish was good. Sakon [Yamamoto] put in a very good performance, finishing ten seconds down on his team mate, by far his most competitive finish of his F1 career. It was a good effort from him and he matched the pace of Adrian [Sutil] all weekend, so there are a lot of positives."
Sutil's performances in 2007 nhave improved as the year has gone on, and the team is confident that the German can go well again at Spa after an solid test there in July.
"When you look at the race results, you’ll see us in 19th and 20th positions and I’m sure you’ll think not much has changed, but I think we can be very positive about the team’s performance over the [Monza] weekend," team principal Colin Kolles insisted, "As a team, we did not make any mistakes, two new cars ran faultlessly and both got to the finish despite only having a limited testing programme beforehand.
"We also showed an improvement in race pace over the A-spec cars, with both Adrian and Sakon setting times very similar to the Toro Rossos and Super Aguris. This year, we have struggled on tracks with low downforce and high speeds but, in Monza, we were much closer than before. I think it was a solid debut that we can certainly build on.
"I think Spa-Francorchamps should suit us better than Monza, and we’d like to think that we can better our performance. Our goal has now got to be to get off the back row of the grid so we can take advantage of our improved race pace. We would like to secure tenth in the constructors’ championship, ahead of Toro Rosso, and perhaps, with a strong result in Belgium, we could move up. We had a good test there in July, Adrian knows the track very well – he was the F3 lap record holder there – and, as we showed in Germany, if the weather is changeable, we are one of the few teams that are able to take full advantage of the conditions."
