“Both Lewis and Heikki feel confident in the car [and] our long runs during testing produced consistent lap times, so the aim is to get better positions tomorrow in the race than today in qualifying.”
Christian Horner [Red Bull – team principal]:
“It was a great recovery from Mark today, seeing as he didn’t do a single timed lap in this morning’s practice session. He got through the first session on only the prime tyres, progressed into Q3 and did a good job there. After a promising first run, David unfortunately dropped a little bit of time in the third sector, which was the difference between Q1 and Q2 today. It’s going to be a busy afternoon for him tomorrow.”
Fabrice Lom [Renault – principal engineer, track support]:
“Firstly we apologise for Mark’s engine problem this morning – that’s not the service we want to be providing. Fortunately it didn’t affect him too much for qualifying, and we’re very pleased with his seventh place. For David, unfortunately he missed out on Q2, but hopefully he can make up some places tomorrow.”
Pascal Vasselon [Toyota – senior general chassis manager]:
“Barcelona is the circuit where we spend most of our winter-time testing, yet almost every season when we come here for the race we have to re-do everything because the track conditions change so much. Yesterday we had to re-visit most of the set-up directions that we had taken, like most of the other teams.
“We’ve done an average job, because the final result is not too bad but not good either. Jarno did very well to end up on the fourth row. Timo had a good start to qualifying, but unfortunately he did not improve in the second outing of Q2 when most of the others did improve.
“Now I’m curious to see where the cars will stop tomorrow, because it seems there may be different fuel levels at play. The tyre situation is the only thing which will be as expected, and it is not hard to know what the main race tyre will be tomorrow. Now we will push as hard as ever for a strong result.”
Steve Clark [Honda – head of race and test engineering]:
“The top ten times were all very close and Rubens was just 0.065s away from making it into Q3, so a top ten place was certainly within our grasp. We have certainly improved the car with our latest developments, however the same is true of our near competitors and the goalposts are moving all the time.
