The car's pace steadily improved over the course of the season, however their main rivals Marussia and Caterham improved too, leaving it as the outright slowest car on the grid that season, only managing once to beat any of their rivals on outright pace, with de la Rosa edging out Timo Glock at Germany and Karthikeyan closing in on him in the closing laps. The car had very strong pace at Canada, bringing a new low-downforce rear wing which helped de la Rosa out-qualify both the Marussias and enabled him and Karthikeyan to match their pace in the race until they both retired with brake failure. They both out-qualified Charles Pic's Marussia at Valencia and were within 103.7% of the fastest Q1 time, a personal best for the season. De la Rosa out-qualified Karthikeyan at every race except Monza, Singapore and Brazil, and out-raced him at every race except Malaysia, though de la Rosa was eventually classified ahead as Karthikeyan was given a post-race time penalty for giving Sebastian Vettel a puncture whilst being lapped. After the summer break they suffered from increasing reliability issues due to the declining financial situation in the team which gave rise to rumours they were short of resources and were using components beyond their expected lifespan.