Tonio dreams of McLaren drive

In an interview with Italian magazine Autosprint Tonio admits that he dreams about driving for McLaren one day. Although he has a contract with Force India till the end of 2011, he says a seat at the prestigious English team is his ultimate goal. He takes Mark Webber as an example: “Who would have said last year that the Australian would be running for the title?”. So: never say never.

After an average start to the season, Tonio was really satisfied when he grabbed the sixth spot on the grid for the Canadian GP, his best qualifying position to date. On Sunday he fought himself back to the ninth position after colliding with Felipe Massa in the first lap of the race.

“Everything is going well at Force India, I’m feeling good and I have an agreement until the end of 2011 with them. But my aim is to race for McLaren, which has always been my favourite team, that’s my dream.”

Tonio talks about how things have changed after the Turkish Grand Prix. “Firstly the chassis. In Montreal I used the chassis that I had in the first four races of the season. The start of the season was good, but team-mate Adrian Sutil went better when the car had more potential than normal. For me, the problems with the chassis started in Barcelona, and I lost ground.”

“As for Force India as a team, they have done a great job in relation to the available budget. Looking forward we are optimistic, because the teams with higher budgets must learn how to work with smaller budgets, and we (as a smaller team) already know how to do that. In Montreal we were just half a second of the leader. We want to maintain this performance, so we’ll be ready to be there when the opportunity might arise. Our intention is to try to catch Renault in the constructors’ championship.”