26/09/2009
NEWS STORY
Nico Rosberg matched his career-best qualifying result of P3 recorded in Malaysia in 2006 in a scintillating performance in Singapore tonight. Having set the fastest low fuel lap in Q2, he secured the third best time despite only having the benefit of one run in final qualifying and was midway through an improving lap when a red flag incident concluded the session. Team-mate Kazuki Nakajima was close to his fourth appearance in the top ten shoot-out this season and held P10 until the dying seconds of the second qualifying session when he was edged out by just under two tenths of a second. He has, however, freedom on his fuel strategy for tomorrow's night race.
Nico Rosberg: It's been a great day as it has been the result of some good work to change and adapt the set-up of the car in practice and even in Q1. Going into qualifying, it all came alive in Q2 and I got a super lap in. Although Q3 was not as easy on heavy fuel loads, I think we are seeing the benefit of a lot of development work that has gone into the car and I am really pleased for the whole team that we have made another step towards a podium finish and we may even be able to fight for a win sometime soon. P3 is a great position to start from tomorrow and I will be on the clean side of the track, which might prove to be important.
Kazuki Nakajima: It was frustrating to be P11 and just miss out making it into Q3. The car had more potential if I had been able to find more from the tyre on warm up, but I had quite a few different points on the lap where I was struggling. That said, I think we have a good chance to score some points from where we are tomorrow.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: It was a fantastic qualifying performance from Nico tonight with his true pace only shown in Q2 because of the red flag in Q3. So I'm really happy for him and expect him to race well tomorrow. Kazuki just missed the cut for Q3, but can race for points tomorrow with a good fuel strategy. We could see from yesterday's practice that the FW31 upgrades were working well, so development is going in the right direction and well done to everybody in the team that has contributed to this progress.