De la Rosa fears not qualifying in Austin

Yesterday, all the teams struggled with a lack of grip during the first laps on the new Austin circuit, but the small HRT team seems to have suffered the consequences of this situation more than the others, to the point that if the situation does not improve, the drivers believe it will be difficult to qualify for Sunday’s race.

« I am not confident. It will depend on how we get the tires into the right temperature window, something we couldn’t achieve on Friday. That is our biggest problem. We are slower than on other circuits mainly because we are not making the tires work at all, whether they are hard or medium. They are like new after 10 laps, » reports Pedro de la Rosa to our colleagues from Autosport.

Many drivers think that the track will improve throughout the weekend, offering more and more grip, but for de la Rosa, the problem with his HRT is too significant and the track evolution too slow to be optimistic: « The track evolution was very slow because there was no rubber buildup. This makes me think that Saturday will be complicated for us. If the track evolution is similar to Friday, then we will have problems, and it will be a very tough qualifying for us. »

One solution would be to approach qualifying in race mode by doing long stints to get the Pirelli tires sufficiently up to temperature in order to hope to start tomorrow’s race.

« It looks like in Q1 we will have to put in a lot of fuel and keep driving until the end of the clock, but let’s hope I’m wrong. Let’s hope there will be a bit more rubber on the track and that we will manage to make the tires work so that we don’t have to do that, » analyzes the Spanish driver.

If the HRT cars fail to qualify this Saturday, it would be a first since Melbourne where neither de la Rosa nor Karthikeyan managed to meet the 107% rule.