Trulli: Lotus can't fight existing teams

The Italian had his final day of pre-season testing in the T127 at Barcelona today, where his best time was 4.3 seconds down on the pace set by Nico Rosberg.

While he was pleased to log over 100 laps after experiencing some reliability problems on Friday, the 35-year-old admitted that he expects to be at the back of the grid when the season gets underway.

"We cannot be happy about the pace, but this is what we have at the moment so we have to deal with it," Trulli told AUTOSPORT. "We have a lot of work to do.

"We are short on time and everything had to be hurried up to get the car ready for testing and for Bahrain, so we can't really ask for any more from the team.

"We are ready to race, but I can't say we are ready to fight. Maybe with Virgin, but the rest are out of reach at the moment."

Trulli expects the situation to remain the same for the first four races of the season, but he took heart from being able to complete a race simulation today.

"Once we are back in Europe it will be better," he added. "The reliability is ok, so we should be fine. I'm pretty happy with these two days, it was good to put some mileage on the car.

"We are here to discover the problems we have and we know we are lacking in some areas, but there is little we can do now. Things will come later."