Fresh from giving the
BMW Sauber team its first ever F1 victory in Canada two weeks ago,
Robert Kubica had a rude awakening in qualifying for the French Grand Prix on Saturday.
Kubica had to really battle to make it through Q1 and Q2 and in the end his best lap in Q3 was a 1 minute 17.037 seconds, more than half a second off the pace of
Ferrari's
Kimi Raikkonen and three tenths off
Lewis Hamilton, who was 'best of the rest' in third.
Kubica, who qualified seventh, will actually start fifth though, as a result of Hamilton's pit lane gaff in Montreal and the penalty handed to Lewis' team-mate,
Heikki Kovalainen [see separate stories].
"It looks like we are having a difficult weekend," Kubica conceded. "After yesterday's free practice sessions I was expecting us to struggle. The balance of the car is not how I want it to be and my car has a poor overall grip.
"The gap to the top teams seems to have stayed the same, and at the same time the other teams obviously have made a big step forward. My goal now is to score as many points as possible in tomorrow's race, which certainly will not be easy."
Nick Heidfeld meanwhile had an even bigger struggle in the sister
F1.08 and he only set the 12th quickest time in Q2, missing out on making it into the top-ten shoot-out for the second time in three races.
The German also only just scrapped through Q1 and added that they were expecting to do a lot better: "The circuit here in Magny-Cours is completely different to the one in Montreal, and right from the beginning of the weekend here we were not as good as we have been recently. But still we were hoping for a better qualifying.
"I'm 12th and Robert just made it into the top ten of qualifying – this is, of course, not what we at the BMW Sauber F1 Team expect from ourselves."
