30/07/2011
NEWS STORY
It's been revealed that an overzealous trigger finger was to blame for Mark Webber's comparatively poor qualifying lap.
The Australian suffered his worst qualifying position of the year, barring China when he failed to make it into Q2 after crashing in final practice leaving his car badly damaged and then suffering a KERS problem.
Like teammate Vettel, Red Bull mechanics worked late into the night on Friday to prepare Webber's car. The tight packaging of the RB7 makes it a difficult car to work on, the Australian reveals, meaning that even straight forward tasks take longer than usual.
"We got to about 3:30am as well," he revealed. "People think we're reinventing the whole car but obviously it's just a tough car to work on, so to do even pretty small changes takes quite a long period of time.
"We didn't turn the car upside down overnight," he added.
After the session, in which his teammate took his seventh pole of the season, the Australian revealed that being held up on his out lap, and attempting to deploy his DRS too early, meant his final qualifying lap was not as quick as it could have been.
"We had a few KERS issues in the middle of the session", he said, "but we had it back for the last run.
"The problem started really on the out lap. The McLaren's out lap was like the old Jaguar out laps, just tootling around.
"I couldn't go any quicker because JB wouldn't let me pass, which is all fair game, I don't have a problem with that, I would do the same thing if I had to do an out lap like that," he continued.
"So because it was my first lap to start with KERS and DRS it looks like I've activated the DRS a sniff early, and it didn't respond. So I did the whole first straight without DRS.
"That, in combination with JB, means my first sector was a complete disaster. From turn five I hear that the lap was identical to Sebastian's."