20/08/2005
NEWS STORY
The inaugural qualifying session at the Istanbul Park saw many drivers making mistakes and failing to achieve a good flying lap. Unlike many, Nick Heidfeld had a clean run and set the sixth fastest time, whereas team mate Mark Webber was prevented from doing so by Takuma Sato's car that was still on the track when the Australian started his qualifying lap. Mark still managed to achieve 7th position.
Nick Heidfeld: My qualifying lap was ok. As usual, it's difficult to find all the grip on the first lap but I am quite satisfied with this result, especially if I look at the rest of the weekend when I had some small, annoying problems in nearly every session. At least qualifying went all right! It looks like we are in better shape than we have been in the last few races, which is the most important thing. We are making progress and hopefully we will collect some points tomorrow.
Mark Webber: As with qualifying these days, we won't really know our performance until the race but we look pretty reasonable here. Obviously BAR didn't have any communications, or Takuma didn't know what was happening. He did a very slow lap, then an even slower in-lap, which compromised my qualifying but that's how it goes. That was a really important corner and it probably compromised my lap by about three tenths of a second. We're still up there though.
Sam Michael (Technical Director, WilliamsF1): It was a good qualifying session for the team on this new circuit. It is such a great track, a real drivers' circuit, which is what we could see from the differences in qualifying. It is likely that we will see some good racing here tomorrow. We are okay on tyres, brakes and cooling.
Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): Since we are at a completely new circuit, we saw a lot more errors in qualifying than usual. Our drivers didn't make any mistakes, but Mark was held up by Sato. His result might have been even better if this hadn't of happened. We are, however, satisfied with sixth and seventh positions as they show an improvement.