“It will be very difficult starting the race from 15th, but it does allow us to decide our fuel level. I’m hoping I’ll get a good start and gain some positions from the outset, and then we shall see where we can go from there.”
Sébastien Bourdais:
“Yesterday I said that if everything went our way it would be possible to get into Q2. Obviously I was quite happy to be 13th in Q1 because it really wasn’t the greatest lap, as I had quite a lot of traffic in front of me. Unfortunately, the track conditions kept improving and we were running out of adjustments to dial out the understeer in Q2.
“It was a bit frustrating, because it felt as though the car had some more in it. Then on my last run I aborted the lap because I had a moment, which was down to the fact we tried something different to try and get rid of the understeer, but it did not give us grip and it upset the balance.”
David Coulthard:
“I’m shocked about that. I dropped some time in turn twelve, but the problem occurred at the start of the lap. I went out in a bunch of traffic and had Sutil behind me, so I couldn’t back off, which compromised warming up the tyres.
“We believed we were fast enough to go through the first session only using prime tyres, which take longer to warm up than the options. Under normal conditions, if you put in a hard out-lap, then using primes like that shouldn’t be a problem, but unfortunately it didn’t work out for us today. After this morning, I thought we were looking good for making it into Q3, but we took a risk and it didn’t work.”
Sebastian Vettel:
“I was always struggling a bit in the first sector of the lap. Towards the end of Q1, I was reasonably well-placed, but I did not feel confident with the car as I had no feeling for it in that first sector. It seemed as though the car wasn’t ready and it was sliding around a lot.
