Timo Glock (21st): “I’m a little disappointed to end qualifying the way we did because we had good pace early on in the session. On the very first run my lap was penalised by Vitaly Petrov, who came out of the pits and pulled out on to the racing line into turn one. On the second run I had good pace and we were ahead of Lotus, but on the third set of tyres there was no grip on the rear. Everyone was able to improve but we didn’t. We have incurred a grid penalty for tomorrow as a result of taking the decision to change our differential, but it was the right thing to do. In general I am happy with the car so we will see what the race brings tomorrow.”
Lucas di Grassi (22nd): “A good Saturday overall. I’m satisfied with my lap time in qualifying and I extracted the maximum from the car today as our set-up is a compromise for the long race tomorrow. So far the whole team and car has run really smoothly this weekend so I can see a lot of progress in this area and I hope it continues for tomorrow.”
Mark Herd, Head of Performance and Race Engineering: “Today has been another relatively smooth day. The cars went in a slightly different direction in terms of aero setup. We weren’t happy with the differential on Timo’s car and chose to change it before qualifying, thus incurring a five-place grid penalty. Timo was unlucky to be blocked on his first run and then seemed to have an unexpected loss of grip on his final set. Lucas had some small gear-shift issues. It was disappointing that were unable to displace Lotus but the gap to them is small and we look forward to a very close race with them tomorrow.”
