24/06/2006
NEWS STORY
After very promising practice sessions, the BMW Sauber F1 Team failed to make it into the top ten in qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix. In the morning's third free practice session only the two Renault drivers were faster than Jacques Villeneuve and Nick Heidfeld, while on Friday test and reserve driver, Robert Kubica, was quickest in both sessions. Jacques finally qualified 11th for his home Grand Prix while Nick came 13th.
Jacques Villeneuve: The track heated up, we lost the balance of the car and couldn't get it to work anymore. It is very disappointing as now we are in the middle of the pack for the first corner. We should be all right once the race gets going so we just need to keep our nose clean in the first corner. We missed getting into the last part of qualifying by thousandths of a second, which was very annoying as we were really looking forward to being in the top ten here.
Nick Heidfeld: After the good practice sessions we were naturally hoping for a better qualifying result. The car suffered a big balance change, and just felt different every time we went out today. On my last lap I had some understeer, especially in the first sector. I am very disappointed but am already looking forward to tomorrow. We can still get in the points as we have had a good pace all weekend.
Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): After three strong free practice sessions both our drivers had problems in qualifying. We are not happy with the result because we wanted to get both cars into the top ten. Jacques missed the top ten by 18 thousandths of a second and Nick by seven hundredths. Now we have to work on finding the right strategy so we can collect some points in the race.
Willy Rampf (Technical Director Chassis): This was a difficult qualifying in which we did not reach our goals. Both drivers were complaining about the balance of the car, which was not as good as in the morning's third free practice. We now have to analyse why this happened. However, we have proved in the practice sessions our performance over long runs is good and we need to take advantage of this during the race to get into the points.
To check out our Canada qualifying picture gallery, click here