15/10/2011
NEWS STORY
AT&T Williams were unable to extract a more competitive performance than a Q2 time out of the FW33 during today's qualifying session for the Korean Grand Prix. On the super soft tyre throughout, Pastor Maldonado passed through Q1 and in his first qualifying experience at the Korean International Circuit set the 16th fastest time in Q2. Meanwhile, team mate Rubens Barrichello will start tomorrow's race from P18 on the grid with a complete set of fresh, soft rubber.
Pastor Maldonado: I didn't get much running on low fuel this morning, just four timed laps, and this track is not easy, especially sectors 2 and 3. I think I did some good laps in qualifying, in both Q1 and Q2. We are a bit far away from the top ten so we need to keep working. Tomorrow is another day and we have lots of new tyres which is important for our race strategy.
Rubens Barrichello: My first lap in Q1 was quite good but my tyres had started to go off by the third lap. As we had decided to conserve tyres before the session started, we aborted the run and came in. We made the best call we could today based on the performance we have in the car at the moment.
Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer: P3 was trouble free with both cars concentrating on collecting as much information as possible from the soft and super soft tyres for the race. This was particularly important considering we had no dry running on Friday. No one is happy with our performance in qualifying and we are all aware of the need to continue to improve throughout the remainder of the season. As a team we are pushing hard to understand the areas where we need to concentrate on in order to accelerate the development process and drive the performance forward.
Check out our Korea qualifying gallery, here.