“Unfortunately on the second run of Q2 we had a problem with the front right wheel drive pegs that still has to be fully analysed. He could make it back to the pits, but he was definitely unable to finish a quick lap. We will have to investigate exactly what happened with him.
“Jarno did his usual great job – even if he only just made the top ten after his second outing in Q2 did not go as expected. Still, I remain confident that we are in a good position for the race. This is probably the first time this season that the tyre choice is not straightforward, so we will see a mix of tyre strategies tomorrow.”
Sam Michael [Williams-Toyota – technical director]:
“That wasn't really what we expected from qualifying today. We thought Nico would get into Q3 based on all of the practice running and fuel loads that we did yesterday, but we struggled getting the balance right on his car in the middle sector. From a strategy perspective, however, eleventh isn't a bad place to start the race from.
“Kazuki missed out on a place in Q2 by just a tenth. We expected him to be slightly behind as we didn't have some recent aero updates available for him. For the race, we'll be looking for both drivers to have good starts and push to get into the points with a good strategy.”
Steve Clark [Honda – head of race and test engineering]:
“The issues we had were with the tyres and trying to get grip from the prime or a balance on the option tyre. We saw this morning that the two tyres behaved differently, and the two drivers split their strategy in Q1 because of this.
“In the second session neither car had the pace to get into the top ten. We had no problems aside from being able to get the most out of the tyres, so obviously this is a disappointment as we felt we had made a little more progress here.
