15/05/2010
NEWS STORY
Formula One's drivers and engineers successfully negotiated twenty three cars around Monte Carlo's narrow, three mile street circuit today to produce an incident free qualifying session ahead of tomorrow's Monaco Grand Prix. For the third time this season, Rubens Barrichello made it into the top ten, putting his FW32 in P9 on the timesheets. In only his first outing around the Principality, Nico Hulkenberg put in a creditable performance to secure P11 for Sunday's race.
Rubens Barrichello: I enjoyed myself out there today and I'm happy with ninth. I took everything out of the car that I could and I don't think we could have done much better. We all thought traffic was going to be an issue this afternoon, but really it was fine. Monaco is a good track for our car so hopefully we will do well tomorrow.
Nico Hulkenberg: As expected, it was a bit busy in Q1 but everyone seemed to get a lap in. The car felt pretty competitive, but my lap wasn't perfect and I'm disappointed to have missed out on Q3 by a fraction. Eleventh is not bad, but when your team mate is ahead of you it's never very pleasant. It's still possible to have a good race from 11th though and I'm hoping for a decent result in my first Monaco Grand Prix.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: It was a good effort to get one car into the top ten, but we were not quite fast enough to get both through. Rubens extracted everything he could from the car and Nico performed well considering it's his first time in a Formula One car around Monaco. The development parts worked well here and we have more coming to the next three races. We'll now focus our attention on getting good starts in the race.