Sauber's
Kamui Kobayashi felt letdown following the Chinese Grand Prix after he was unable to make the most of his best-ever qualifying result.
Kobayashi started third at the Shanghai International Circuit, venue for the third round in the 2012 F1 World Championship, but a poor start led to an early slide down the order and in the end he could do no better than tenth.
“I'm not really sure what happened at the start, my car just didn't move, it was a bit strange and I lost positions immediately,” he lamented. “Then I was stuck in traffic for most of the time, also we made the second pit stop a bit late and the tyres had gone.”
Although upset with the result though, he still felt there were several positives to take from the weekend as F1 2012 rolls on.
“Of course after what we did in qualifying the race result is disappointing. Quite often we have recovered in the race from a bad qualifying, but today it was the other way round,” he added. “However we have proven we can be strong in both qualifying and race, and next time we will put this all together.”
Team-mate Sergio Perez meanwhile also had a tough afternoon and he eventually brought his car home in P11.
“I must say I am very disappointed,” he continued. “I had a very good start, and for the entire first stint it really looked to be going very well for me. But then when I picked up the medium compound tyres I lost a lot of performance from lap 17 onwards.
“I feel I would have been better off with a three stop strategy [like that used by my team-mate], but you never know. The pit stops as such were good, but at both I lost time at the launch because we had a problem with the clutch. However, this is racing and we will do better next time.”
“We are obviously disappointed with this result. After our strong qualifying we expected more. However, we were not fast enough, and our strategy didn't work out – both our drivers got stuck in traffic,” summarised Sauber CEO, Monisha Kaltenborn.
by Philip Barclay