Jenson Button – 1st: “This morning was reasonably good, and this afternoon was better. I was struggling a little through Turn Eight, it’s an area we’ll be working on overnight because it’s pretty tricky through there at the moment. It’s a tough corner, especially if the car’s moving around – so we’ve got to hope we can solve some of those issues before tomorrow.
“The car feels reasonably good around here – there are still some areas where we’re not so strong, and the Red Bulls will once again be the cars to beat in qualifying tomorrow, we can’t get away from that. I just hope we’re closer than we’ve been in the last two races.
“I think the Ferrari will be quick here too. It should be the top four teams that we normally see, and possibly Renault as well, so I don’t think qualifying tomorrow will be boring. There should be some good battles.”
Lewis Hamilton – 4th: “This is such a great circuit, and the grip didn’t seem too bad today. It also seems very tight between all the frontrunners – the times are very close. Our car doesn’t seem to be performing too badly, so I’m happy with today’s running.
“Turn Eight is quite bumpy as always, and you could see today that some of the others were having a few difficulties through there, but it wasn’t a problem for us.
“I have no doubts that tomorrow in qualifying the Red Bulls will pull out something extra, which they always seem able to do. We haven’t made too many changes to the car for this race, but we’ve got a chance this weekend, and I think we’ll be able to compete with them.”
Martin Whitmarsh, Team principal, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes: “We’ve made a number of small improvements to the car for this race, and we spent the day evaluating and back-to-backing those components on Jenson and Lewis’s cars. The job for the engineers now is to evaluate that data ahead of tomorrow’s sessions.
“We’re reasonably confident with the pace we showed today. While it’s not indicative of overall performance, we feel that our package should be quite efficient here, and, as always, we’re confident that we’ll be able to refine the car overnight ahead of qualifying tomorrow.
“This is a demanding circuit – for both drivers and engineers, and we’ve still got plenty of work to do to optimise our cars for qualifying and the race.”
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