30/07/2005
NEWS STORY
Progress continued apace for the Minardi F1 Team today at the Hungaroring, drivers Christijan Albers and Robert Doornbos taking up where they left off at the end of Friday's initial two free practice sessions. After making further chassis adjustments on Saturday morning, both drivers carried out qualifying simulation runs with new tyres fitted to their cars, posting promising lap times in the process. Come the afternoon qualifying session, and Albers put in another committed performance, to secure 17th place on the starting grid for the Hungarian Grand Prix, while brake lock-ups approaching Turn 1 and Turn 12 lost Doornbos time on what was shaping up to be an impressive lap. As a result, he will start 19th in tomorrow's race.
Christijan Albers: I'm glad today's qualifying went well, and now we'll wait to see how the performance of the car is in the race tomorrow. We had some bad luck at the beginning of the weekend and lost quite a bit of time in the garage on Friday, but hopefully, we can get it together for the race so the car remains well balanced.
Robert Doornbos: We did some good work this morning and I think found a good race set-up for the car. We had to make a slight compromise for qualifying, and I had a bit of a moment in Turn One with the brakes and ran wide. I tried to recover the rest of the lap, but then had another moment in the third sector. I therefore couldn't get the optimum lap time, as I would have liked, but for the race, on used tyres, the car is very good, so we are definitely feeling optimistic for tomorrow.
Paul Stoddart, Team Principal, Minardi Cosworth: Another strong performance from the Minardi drivers in qualifying saw Christijan ahead of our nearest rivals and Robert split the Jordans after he made a small mistake under braking in the first sector of his qualifying lap. Overall, the team's performance has been strong so far this weekend, and with continuing improvements to the car and a sensible strategy for tomorrow's 20th Hungarian Grand Prix, we are looking forward to the race.