India puts 'brakes' on HRT

Pedro de la Rosa has revealed he had no warning prior to the brake failure that put him out of the 2012 F1 Indian Grand Prix.

HRT have had re-occurring issues with the brakes for a number of races now and talking after his exit on lap 42, the Spaniard said it is something they need to need to try and address quickly, especially as the next race in Abu Dhabi is in just seven days time.

"It's a shame that I had to retire because the car was running well on the hard tyres but, with no warning, the brakes failed," de la Rosa confirmed. "This circuit is very demanding with three consecutive hard braking corners and with the high temperatures this can happen but the important thing is that I'm fine and the car isn't too damaged for Abu Dhabi.

"We have to understand why this failure occurred though, and fix it because Abu Dhabi is another challenging circuit for the brakes."

Team-mate Narain Karthikeyan meanwhile also had issues with overheating brakes, although he managed to nurse his car to the end and was 21st at the chequered flag in front of his home fans.

"I got off to a good start but had an incident on the first corner and lost a chunk of my front wing. The damage wasn't too severe but we had problems with the balance of the car from then on. But the greatest problem was the overheating of the brakes," he remarked.

"They warned me on the radio that I had to look after them because we had to make it to the end. And we did that. Today we got the most out of what we had and I'm happy to have finished my home race".

"It was a tough race, especially at the beginning, because of the overheating of the brakes - something which we weren't expecting to have at this circuit," summarised HRT boss, Luis Perez-Sala. "From the start we were running to the limit temperature-wise and we had to reduce our pace a bit. We improved from then on and maintained our pace but towards the end Pedro had a brake failure and was unable to finish.

"Narain also had a complicated race but at least was able to finish in front of his home fans".