Lotus have yet to score a point this year, but Heikki Kovalainen lapped the other new teams in finishing 16th in Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix.

In qualifying for the Canadian GP, Heikki Kovalainen was just two hundredths of a second off beating the Sauber of Kamui Kobayashi, just showing the impressive performance by the Malaysian-owned team in catching the middle runners.

Instead of being best of the new teams, Lotus are focusing on catching the back of the established teams, and we  can expect to see Lotus racing with Sauber or even Williams, at some stage, although Toro Rosso may have now pulled too far ahead – they had a great race in Canada, with Sebastien Buemi leading at one stage.

Next up is Lotus’s 500th Grand Prix and Colin Chapman’s family will be present at the historic race. Malaysian or not, they sure know the heritage of the team and they will mark the milestone with a specially designed livery, but Clive Chapman (son of Colin) says that he would easily swap this for a good result:

“Much as it is nice that Lotus Racing is celebrating 500th Grand Prix, I am sure the most important thing about the weekend for the team is that it is another race and the next opportunity to continue to make progress towards the established teams.

“It was exciting to watch Montreal qualifying, when Heikki almost pipped the Sauber, and I for one would swap the 500th landmark for the landmark of outqualifying an established team in normal circumstances. Fingers crossed!”