Nick Heidfeld, 9th: “In third practice we tried a few small set-up changes, and it went according to plan with no major incidents. When I reached Qualifying, my Q1 did not go as well as I would have liked because I’d planned to do just one lap in order to save the tyres. Unfortunately, I experienced a bit of traffic during my flying lap, which slowed me down somewhat and so I had to carry on and do more laps than I wanted to try and bring the time down. Q2 was ok, but we knew we needed to improve to get through, so we did another lap on new options which was successful as I managed to squeeze into the top 10 by finishing ninth fastest. Then, when I went out in Q3, we saw that Sutil was not going to do a lap time so we quite rightly came back in because the cars ahead had posted times that were considerably quicker. Of course, when you’re in the car and you are called back, you want to stay out and have a go! But, it was the right decision because we’ve saved tyres. We were targeting higher than P9 and P11 but realistically, on today’s pace, that’s where we were so we will now look forward to a strong race tomorrow.”
Vitaly Petrov, 11th: “The gap between me and P10 was very close, but that’s racing – sometimes other cars are faster than you and tomorrow is another day. We didn’t have any particular problems, just not quite enough speed so we will try our hardest in the race tomorrow. It’s a long race and it won’t be an easy one in this heat. We will analyse the data and hope we perform better on fresh tyres. I’m sure there will be a lot of overtaking and much will depend on who can look after the rear tyres the best. Here, the degradation is not as bad as we have seen and we will not see a race like Barcelona so I’m confident we can take a good stride forwards and get a good result.”
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