Heikki Kovalainen is willing to give Caterham time to improve

The Finn had hoped for Caterham to be challenging the established teams in the midfield this season, but the team's CT01 has fallen short of expectations and is still lacking pace.

With high hopes that updates scheduled for the next two races can give the team the step up it needs, however, Kovalainen says he is not yet at the stage of being frustrated.

"I've kept pushing and I can be happy about that," he said. "I've kept at 110 per cent effort all of the time, and I haven't let it distract me too much. I push the team hard all of the time to make the right steps. But apart from that, I just have to make sure that I keep myself at the level I need to be and the performance has been as good as last year.

"It is what it is and I know that the team is working on it in the right areas, which is good. I just need to wait for the results of that work to come through. In the meantime, all I can do is work on the other things and the set-up."

Looking towards the longer term future, Kovalainen said that he would be happy to stay at Caterham if the outfit can prove to him that it is moving forwards.

"The updates that we are bringing towards the end of the season will be crucial," he said. "The team is making the right moves and, in theory, should be able to make progress. It's fair to say that I'm very hungry for success.

"I'm performing very well myself, but it's hard to judge how well because we are in our own land at the moment. I can't challenge properly the other guys to show how good I could be. That's a question that at some point we need to sit down and think about.

"I haven't thought about it and I haven't made any effort to look at it seriously. I haven't looked anywhere else yet or spoken about it with the team. I will wait and see how things are coming along. It's fair to say that I do want to keep making progress. I don't want to be in this kind of position next year and I don't think the team wants to be there either."