Klien ponders testing role

Klien landed his drive at Jaguar on the back of sponsorship from Red Bull and, despite a sixth placed finish in the incident-filled Belgian Grand Prix, he generally failed to impress alongside highly-rated team-mate Mark Webber.

That has left his chances of securing a drive with a competitive team as remote, but he is still pushing hard for a third-driver role if teams have to run three cars next season should one of the current outfits shut down.

"As long as there's a race seat available, I'll be chasing it," Klien told autosport.com. "But if everything is full you also have to look at the possibility of being third driver for a bigger team. A testing role in a top team is a good solution for a driver with my experience, so we will be looking at that too.

"For the moment I have nothing decided. We are talking to a couple of teams and waiting to see what happens with Jaguar Racing now. I think there will be a lot going on in the next couple of weeks."

Klien's primary hope of staying in a full-time race seat next year is if Red Bull buys the Jaguar Racing team - but the energy drinks giant is now looking unlikely to conclude a deal.

Red Bull's motorsport advisor Helmut Marko said earlier this week: "I think that Red Bull taking over Jaguar Racing becomes more and more unlikely. Time is running out.

"The problem is that at Ford people are deciding the future who have no clue about F1 and who do not care about timescales."

Klien himself said about the Red Bull situation: "It's something I have no interference on, so it's up to other people to decide what will happen. But for sure it would be a good possibility."

Looking back on his rookie season in F1, Klien confesses to it having been tougher than he expected - especially in the first half of the campaign.

"Yes, it was more difficult than I expected," he explained. "There were a lot more things to learn than I expected, as I didn't really know what was awaiting me.

"The first half of the season was very difficult, but in the second half of the season I think I did well. I had some good races, I finished sixth in Spa and had other good results, close to the points, but with our car we also needed luck to score points. When the top five teams get their cars to the end of the race, there's no way we could get any points."