Pedro de la Rosa (17th): “Well, we knew before qualifying that it would be a difficult one. We ran the car for the first time on a significantly lower downforce level and it doesn’t really suit us. We are sliding all over the place, and that’s why the tyres don’t work. There is no grip at all and on top of that I had difficulties heating up the brakes. We have to see what we can do in tomorrow’s race in terms of tyre strategy, and be prepared to benefit from possible safety car situations.”
Kamui Kobayashi (18th): “We are having a hard weekend here. Our overall performance is not where we were in Turkey. I had big problems with warming up the tyres. I just didn’t get them to work and this made it impossible to exploit any of the car’s potential. The fact I had traffic on my last lap didn’t help either. I knew today’s qualifying would be difficult, but still didn’t expect it to be that bad. However, tomorrow is race day and I hope to get a chance to improve.”
Peter Sauber, Team Principal: “It has been a difficult weekend right from the beginning, and I don’t think we were able to exploit the full potential of the car.”
James Key, Technical Director: “It was a disappointing qualifying session. I think we could have gone a little bit further, but Q3 was definitely out of reach today. In Q1 Kamui was held up a bit on his last run and, as a result, couldn’t improve his position. Both drivers suffered from a lack of grip today, and the balance of the cars seemed to be quite different this afternoon to this morning, which caught us out a bit. They were limited in a different way. We needed to rebalance the cars during the qualifying session. Ultimately I think it’s far from ideal where we are, and we need to have a clean race tomorrow and a sensible strategy to bring both cars home and hope for the best.”
