04/07/2015
NEWS STORY
Romain Grosjean qualified twelfth and Pastor Maldonado fourteenth after a tough qualifying session for the British Grand Prix. Despite reporting an improved car from yesterday in this morning’s practice, neither driver was able to extract sufficient pace to break into the top ten so missed the final qualifying session at Silverstone today.
Romain Grosjean: "I think that we had a decent enough qualifying session today and did a very good job with the car as it works here. It felt okay in Q1 on the option tyres, but we seemed to get a lot of understeer for Q2 which didn’t help. The race will be long tomorrow but with some good tyre management we will see what we can achieve. It isn’t the easiest track to make overtakes but as always we will push to achieve the best possible."
Pastor Maldonado: "Of course, I’m not happy with my position on the grid but we’ve seen before that we are better in the races than in qualifying, so we hope that is the case for Silverstone. I think that we still struggle with the harder tyre compounds and certainly I was not happy with the balance of the car this afternoon. The race is long and we’re working on getting the best pace possible."
How was qualifying for the team?
Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director: Disappointing. We knew there was a possibility that Silverstone may not play to the strengths of our car and unfortunately that proved to be the case in qualifying. It’s a downforce hungry circuit here and we struggled relative to our nearest opponents. Romain had a good run in Q1 but unfortunately we couldn’t get the pace out of the car during Q2.
What are the considerations for tomorrow’s race?
AP: The weather looks to be good and the tyres are pretty durable so there doesn’t appear to be too many strategic variations at our disposal. Starting outside the top ten means that the starting tyre for both drivers is open. We’ll be looking for any opportunity to leap those ahead of us on the grid tomorrow, but any positions gained are likely to be hard won.
Check out our Saturday gallery, here.