30/07/2005
NEWS STORY
BAR Honda drivers Jenson Button and Takuma Sato will line up on the 4th and 5th rows of the grid for tomorrow's Hungarian Grand Prix after posting the 8th and 10th fastest times of this afternoon's qualifying session.
It's all change in the running order as some interesting strategies clearly came into play at the Hungaroring, where the track temperature peaked at a scorching 51°C. As such, it's difficult to know how tomorrow's 70-lap race will shape up but both Jenson and Takuma are happy with the balance of the BAR Honda 007's after a solid morning's progress and the team is eager to pick up where it left off last weekend in Germany.
Jenson Button: "8th on the grid is not a great position to be starting from but hopefully we have a good strategy compared with the cars in front of me. I feel that I was unable to get much more out of the car today because we had pretty low grip. It also looks like we will have some different competition to fight with tomorrow. I'm sure we can achieve our target of some good points from here though so we'll see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully the temperature will have cooled by a few degrees as well."
Takuma Sato: "It was a better day for me today. In the morning we worked on the set-up which we could not do yesterday due to lost running time. We caught up nicely and I was happy with the balance of the car. In qualifying I felt that I had less grip and a bit of oversteer in the middle sector cost me a little time. In the end it was a reasonable lap and we now look forward to see what we can do from this position and hope that we have a strong package for tomorrow."
Gil de Ferran: "We are reasonably happy with our qualifying slots and both drivers had good clean laps. We suspect there are different strategies at play in the front half of the field, therefore it is hard to draw any definite conclusions. The cars are fairly well-balanced and we hope our homework will pay good dividends tomorrow."
Shuhei Nakamoto: "The drivers did a good job in very hot weather conditions. This morning we continued the good set-up work from yesterday and achieved a lot of solid preparation for the qualifying session. This afternoon, Takuma lost a bit of time in the second sector but both drivers performed well against our expectations for today. We'll have to see how the various strategies unfold tomorrow but I am looking forward to a strong race for us."