Formula 1 News

2010 European GP, qualifying: Team quotes 

Vijay Mallya: “It’s been a disappointing day as we showed a genuine pace this morning and couldn’t quite deliver this afternoon. It’s something to work on tonight and come back strong in the race tomorrow. We’ve shown good pace here before and in fact last year we started 12th and 16th and finished 10th and 12th in the race so there’s still everything to work towards.”

Sam Michael: “To get both cars into Q3 is good progress with the whole car package. Rubens had an issue with glazed brakes, which was a shame as that pushed him down the order. Nico did a good job in qualifying today. We do still have to improve across all areas of the car, and if we do that quickly we’ll feature in the top ten more regularly. Rubens will be racing the blown rear wing tomorrow while Nico will run a standard version.”

Giorgio Ascanelli: “The times were very close this afternoon and Sebastien had a particularly good qualifying session, although there is some feeling of regret because he could have done slightly better than eleventh place, if he had not been held up by traffic towards the end of his last flying lap. What I am particularly pleased about is that, on his final run in Q2, Seb decided to go for a single flying lap to gain the advantage of carrying less fuel weight and it paid off, which was the right way to do it. Jaime, who went for two timed laps on both his Q2 runs, also had a bit of a traffic problem and so he did not get it quite right today. As for tomorrow’s race, free practice demonstrated that we appear to have a good pace over a long run, which is encouraging.”

Mike Gascoyne: “I’m very pleased with Qualifying today – it was a very solid effort from the whole team. We were actually 2.5 seconds off the quickest time in Q1, and percentage wise that’s our best performance of the year so far. We’ve moved further away from the competition behind us, so overall it was a very solid performance, with the whole team continuing to move forward. Now we’ll have to match that with a two car finish in the race tomorrow.”

Tony Fernandes: “There’s a lot of good points that have come out of today – the main one is that we’ve finished quite comfortably ahead of Virgin and HRT, and it was great to hear Jarno happy over the radio – his new chassis looks like it may have brought about a change in luck, so let’s hope that continues tomorrow. Our engineers tell me we’ve taken another step forward today, and hopefully we’ll get even more out of the new Cosworth engine in the race – it’s very encouraging to see the performance of both of the Cosworth powered Williams cars today, so hopefully we can keep pushing like them and get both cars home tomorrow.”

Eric Boullier: “It’s always good to see both cars in Q3 because it’s not something we have managed that often this season. After Q1 and Q2 we were expecting an even better result in Q3, but we didn’t find the performance that we expected with the soft tyres. For the race tomorrow we have a good strategy and hopefully we can get both cars in the points and make up some ground on Mercedes.”

Alan Permane: “I’m pleased to see both cars in the top ten for the second time in three races and it’s nice to be well ahead of both Mercedes, our closest competitors in the championship. We were actually hoping for a better position with Robert today, but we struggled more than we expected with the option tyre. Although it’s the softer compound, the car was moving around more and felt less together on the option. You might expect a softer tyre to have more grip, but you can’t use that extra grip if the car isn’t easy to drive. However, we felt that we needed to start the race on the option, so that we don’t have to do a long stint on it in the race.”

James Key: “It was a disappointing qualifying, but incredibly close. The grip level seemed to be quite inconsistent, and unfortunately it wasn’t possible for Kamui to get through to the second part of qualifying. He flat spotted the front tyres and was therefore not able to put the best sector times together, which seemed to be tricky today on the option tyres. th Pedro did quite a good job in Q1 where he was 13 . He then began Q2 on the prime tyres and switched to the option tyres for the second run, but again a lack of grip and a balance difference between the two compounds seemed to be the problem. Unfortunately he couldn’t improve his lap time, and again the sectors tell a slightly different story. But that’s where we are this weekend, so we have to improve.”

Martin Whitmarsh: “Fast and committed qualifiers that they both are, Lewis and Jenson pushed as hard as possible in Q3 today. However, they both made small errors on their final laps. Lewis’s mistake probably made no difference to his eventual grid position, because the single-lap performance gap to the Red Bulls is quite significant here, but Jenson looked to have P4 in the bag had he negotiated the final corner of his last lap as well as he’d driven the previous turns. Even so, Jenson is an extremely smooth yet very combative race driver – and, bearing in mind that he and Lewis have notched up 86 world championship points in the past two races, we think they’re well set to score significantly again tomorrow.”

Ross Brawn: “Clearly that was a difficult qualifying session. After Montreal, we thought that we understood our issues with the tyres but they are still proving to be a challenge. The team and drivers did as well as they could today but we do not have the pace at the moment and we are not making the tyres work well, particularly in qualifying. We are pushing very hard to develop the car and sometimes in pushing so hard, you trip over. We need to reflect, assess and see what our next steps should be.”

Norbert Haug: “It is a disappointing qualifying result today for our team. Of course it was very tight, but if you are six-tenths slower than the best lap time, then you end up in twelfth place like Nico. Michael hit traffic in the last sector of his fastest lap which prevented him from improving further. We will certainly not give up on improving our package as we have done continuously since the season began but our competitors have been doing the same. Our race pace tomorrow should be better.”

Colin Kolles: “We expected more than the result we did today. Even if we could fix the problems we had on both cars yesterday, unfortunately, we couldn’t perform as well as we did in the races before. The lap times of the new teams are close and if you do a small mistake on a street circuit like this, you get pushed back on the grid. But we will be well prepared for tomorrow’s race and we hope to fight for positions with the other teams again.”

Stefano Domenicali: “We are reasonably pleased with this result. The car proved to be competitive and everything was in place to secure an even better result but, for various reasons, we never managed to put together the perfect lap with either of our two drivers. All the same, we know that as always, the points are only given out tomorrow. We can expect a long and difficult race for the drivers the teams and the cars and, as I usually say on Saturdays, reliability will be the key. The technical updates we introduced this weekend have seen us take a step forward in terms of performance, but we must continue to push on the development front, because the other teams are doing the same.”

Chris Dyer: “There is a hint of disappointment at this result. After this morning’s third free practice session, we saw that our car was very competitive on the harder tyre, while it struggled a bit more to get the best out of the softer one on the single flying lap. In the two hours before qualifying, the team worked on trying to find the right compromise and the situation improved, but not enough to put us in the fight for the very top positions, which was also down to the fact that neither driver managed to get a clean lap in Q3. That explains why Felipe and Fernando ended up where they did. All the same, it’s not a bad position for the race: from what we have seen so far, the F10 seems to be very competitive over a long run.”