20/06/2015
NEWS STORY
Roberto Merhi was in his element in the damp to drying track conditions of Q1 this afternoon. He qualified in 19th place for Round 8 of the FIA Formula One World Championship - the Formula 1 Grosser Preis Von Österreich 2015 - with a fastest lap of 1:14.071 and with Kimi Raikkonen, Jenson Button and Sergio Perez immediately ahead in the order.
His team-mate Will Stevens had a more challenging qualifying session, spinning off into the gravel on his first run and traffic preventing him from finding a good rhythm on his second. He ended the day in P20 with a time of 1:15.368.
Roberto Merhi: "I'm very happy with my qualifying today. I have lost a bit of track time here this weekend, due to a problem yesterday and then the rain in FP3 prevented us from running the option tyre. The track was starting to dry coming into this afternoon's session but they were the perfect conditions for me and I hope we see a repeat of them for the race tomorrow. This can be a challenging track and the first and final corners are tricky, so we have to be ready to take advantage of any opportunity in the race tomorrow. It should be fun!"
Will Stevens: "A frustrating qualifying for me, considering my pace has been very strong all weekend. With tough conditions and the track drying out, it was always going to be the last lap that would be the best and unfortunately I had a lot of traffic during the lap, which cost me quite a bit of time. I'm looking forward to tomorrow as I know our pace is very strong here."
John Booth, Team Principal: "Qualifying was a bit of a mixed bag for us, with Roberto seemingly revelling in the slightly damp conditions and Will being a little less happy today. That aside, both our short and long run pace was looking promising yesterday, so all in all I think we're in good shape and ready for a race that could end up being very interesting. The weather forecast is for mixed conditions and again today we have seen that even the cars at the front of the field have ventured off track in the first and final corners. Our aim is to have a good strong race and resume our previous run of two-car finishes."
Check out our Saturday gallery, here.