Saturday: Minor Disappointment for Virgin and D’Ambrosio at Home
With his 21st place on the starting grid, the Belgian is ahead of the two HRTs but remains behind his teammate, due to a poor strategic choice in qualifying. The Virgin drivers, however, seem satisfied with their pace and the team expects to face new challenges in the race.
Timo Glock – 20th and 20th
« Generally, today’s qualifications were quite OK, but for several reasons we encountered many problems in the first stint, because we made changes between free practice 3 and the qualification: they may not have been the right ones. It was really difficult.
I then went out on track with a new set of intermediate tires, and overall I think the lap was good, even though according to the telemetry data it resembled more of a rally lap. Nonetheless, we got the most out of the car, and I am happy with this result.
Jérôme d’Ambrosio – 19th and 21st
Of course, I am a little disappointed about the result but I am really happy with my pace this weekend. I think I have a good feeling with the car, I was happy with everything and my performance in normal conditions was quite good.
We messed up a bit with the strategy, we really should have pitted, but once again it’s very difficult to make such a decision because it could have just rained a bit earlier and then it wouldn’t have worked anymore. Overall it should have been better, but in terms of performance, we are there, and it should be a good race tomorrow.
Colin Kolles, Team Principal
This morning, with the heavy rain right from the start of the session, we decided to have our drivers do a stint on rain tires to prepare them for these conditions during qualifying. In fact, the qualifying session was a bit tricky because the rain at the beginning of the session wasn’t necessarily very significant in the pit lane, but it was clear that the second sector was very wet. We sent both cars out on intermediate tires, hoping the track would dry out. In reality, the second sector remained quite damp.
Timo was very unhappy with his first set of intermediate tires, so we decided to fit a new set until the end of Q1. From this perspective, we should have stopped Jérôme, but since his times were improving with his initial set of tires, we decided to keep him on the track.
We expect a race on a dry track tomorrow, and this will present new challenges for the drivers and engineers since we have used slick tires and suitable settings very little this weekend.
