GP2 team Coloni wants Stefano Coletti to lead 2012 line-up
Scuderia Coloni has targeted signing GP2 race-winner Stefano Coletti to lead its 2012 driver line-up
The Italian team enjoyed a stunning second half to the 2011 season, as it propelled veteran driver Luca Filippi to second in the championship behind Romain Grosjean.
Coletti joined Coloni for the non-championship round at Abu Dhabi recently, and despite an incident-packed weekend for the Monegasque racer, team boss Paolo Coloni now hopes to strike a deal with him and Italian teenager Kevin Ceccon for next season.
"Frankly I was very pleased by the performances of both our drivers in Abu Dhabi," said Coloni. "Coletti and Ceccon got along very well and did a very good job with the team.
"Going ahead with them would be the ideal choice for me, also to give continuity to the technical development job that we are doing with a young and talented duo."
Coloni also paid tribute to Filippi, who helped turn the team's fortunes around when he was drafted in mid-season after the squad endured a torrid start to the year.
"We were coming from a very good pre-season testing programme, and then [Davide] Rigon's accident in Istanbul [where he broke his leg] changed everything," he added.
"We wanted Luca in the car to understand where we were past half season, to see if that huge potential we had seen before the start of 2011 was still there.
"We immediately realized that it was, and then the relationship between our engineers and Luca was so great that they managed to make the most of that potential very quickly."
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