24/09/2011
NEWS STORY
Marussia Virgin Racing drivers Timo Glock and Jerome D'Ambrosio will start tomorrow's night race in Singapore from 21st and 22nd positions on the grid after a tense qualifying session on the city state's streets today.
Earlier in the day, the track temperature had reached 34°C at the start of the third and final Free Practice session. Jerome led the pack of cars out on to the track for an installation lap, with Timo joining soon after. Jerome went on to complete 19 laps and Timo added a further 16 to the team's tally as they optimised their set-ups for qualifying and tomorrow's race.
With the humidity reaching 71%, it was a hot and sticky qualifying session, and also a challenging one for Timo and Jerome, both of whom suffered some issues with the braking stability of their cars.
Timo Glock: "A difficult weekend so far, starting from the first outing. I haven't been completely happy with the rear of the car and we didn't manage to get it right yet, so qualifying was not perfect. I made a small mistake at the hairpin at Turn 13 but beyond that I think we had the most from the car. I love this race so I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Singapore can throw up all sorts of things so we just need to be ready."
Jerome D'Ambrosio: "I'm a bit disappointed with today's qualifying really. The car is quite good but we just had an issue with the brake balance - it was much more rearwards somehow on my first run, so we had to change this for the second one. It still wasn't perfect and that made me lose a bit of confidence, especially here because you have only one lap - one chance. As always we will go into the race tomorrow looking to maximise what we have and to get both cars home in the best position possible."
John Booth, Team Principal: "What we learned from yesterday is that the degradation on both the Soft and Supersoft tyres looks reasonably high and we therefore opted to save sets of the Soft tyre for the race. Earlier, in FP3, we focused our efforts more on preparation for qualifying, with both drivers using only one set of each compound. They seemed to be suffering with identical issues and unfortunately we don't seem to have made much progress towards resolving them, so it's not surprising that in qualifying we were somewhat disappointed. The Singapore Grand Prix is normally fairly chaotic and we'll be looking to ensure that both cars stay as reliable as ever and with a good strategy I hope we can create some opportunities in the race."
Check out our Singapore qualifying gallery, here.