23/06/2012
NEWS STORY
Charles Pic was the Marussia F1 Team's lone star in today's European Grand Prix qualifying session after Timo Glock was unable to take part for medical reasons.
Shortly after this morning's Free Practice 3, Timo complained of feeling unwell, despite seeming back on the road to recovery following a stomach bug earlier in the weekend. It was clear that he was unable to take part in a demanding qualifying session.
Charles embarked on qualifying with his engineering programme this weekend having shouldered much of the team's car preparation for Sunday's race. He achieved a solid and tidy lap out of his two runs on the Pirelli P-Zero Yellow Soft tyre and got the most from today's package. It is clear however that the team has not had the most straightforward of weekends and as a consequence were unable to improve the overall performance from yesterday.
Charles Pic: "I can't be happy with my position at the end of qualifying today, but I feel that I did everything I could with the car we had today. We have not approached the weekend in the usual way, but in these situations you can only make the best of things and that is what we have done today. We obviously don't know what tomorrow holds just yet but for my side I will be working with the engineers across both sides of the garage tonight to see if we can find a way for the team to make a small step in the race. I wish Timo a speedy recovery."
John Booth, Team Principal: "Unfortunately the weekend continues to run less than smoothly for us and this was certainly the case for qualifying today. Charles drove a very solid lap, but it is clear that we have not yet got all of the areas of the car at optimum performance over a lap and we'll look to improve that for tomorrow's race. After FP3 this morning it was clear that Timo was not sufficiently recovered to take part in qualifying and we felt the best course of action was for him to sit out the session and seek further medical advice. We won't be able to reach any conclusions regarding the race until tomorrow morning, so we wish Timo well and for now we will be working very closely with Charles this afternoon and evening to download as much information as possible. Our objective for tomorrow's race, whatever it may hold, will simply be to do the best job possible in the circumstances."
Check out our qualifying gallery, here.