“In Q3 everything was very tight, and our drivers just missed by the blink of an eye to be in better positions. Nick lost time on his final run because he didn’t have a clear track, as there were several cars in the way driving slowly on their in-laps.”
Christian Horner [Red Bull – team principal]:
“A strong qualifying performance from Mark puts him on the fourth row for tomorrow’s race. The weather was closing in towards the end of Q3 and it all got a little bit frantic, but P8 is a positive result. David has been recovering today after losing a lot of track time yesterday. He only just missed out on Q3 and starts from twelfth, so the target tomorrow is obviously for points.
“Following David’s retirement in Australia, where an incident with Massa caused significant damage to his car, David’s RB4 had a track rod failure during first practice for the Malaysian Grand Prix. It was an isolated incident, which caused him to go off the circuit at turn 14, hit a bump and go heavily into the inside of the kerbing, causing damage to his car’s front suspension.
“The
FIA takes safety extremely seriously and wanted to understand how the failure had happened. They followed up the incident by looking at our procedures in terms of rig testing, R&D testing and proof testing, for each of our components. We’ve demonstrated our diligence in making sure the car is safe; they understand that and are happy with the explanation that we’ve given them.”
Fabrice Lom [Red Bull – principal engineer Renault engines]:
“After a bad day yesterday – when we suffered the first engine failure we’ve had since we joined forces with Red Bull – we bounced back well today. We got two good qualifying positions, of eighth and twelfth, and I think we’re in good shape for tomorrow.”
Adrian Newey [Red Bull – chief technical officer]:
“Yesterday’s incident on David’s car was due to a track rod failure. This in turn was due to a poor bond preparation. The component therefore failed very early in its life.”
Pat Symonds [Renault – executive director of engineering]:
“I think we can be reasonably satisfied with our performance today. With Fernando we got the car into Q3 and we could see that while the times were reasonably close, the margin needed to obtain a good grid position was probably beyond us. As a result we took a tactical decision to fuel quite long, so ninth place was pretty acceptable. Fernando has had a good weekend and worked well with his engineers to get this result.
