Saturday report: Mercedes GP – A disappointing session

After Mercedes’ good form at the end of private testing, everyone expected them to be in the fight for the super-pole. But the Silver Arrows disappointed. Victim of the use of soft tires, Michael Schumacher was eliminated in Q2 by Buemi’s Toro Rosso, while Nico Rosberg settled for seventh place, almost two seconds off the pole time.

Nico Rosberg 7th position 1’25’421

« I am really disappointed because when I went to sleep last night, I was hoping for a good performance in qualifying. This morning, several things didn’t work on the car, but the team did a great job to get everything back to normal for the qualifying session, but we need to find out what happened. I made a small mistake in Q3 that might cost me a spot, but not everything came together for us this weekend. The fact that I start on the good side of the grid is a good point, and we will do our best to score big points tomorrow. »

Michael Schumacher 11th position 1’25″971

« This is clearly not an ideal start to the season, and I can’t hide that I’m disappointed. It’s not about the KERS that only worked intermittently or the fact that I could have gone into Q3, but because our performance is not as good as we wanted. From our experience during winter testing, we weren’t far from Ferrari, but that wasn’t seen today. We’ve had problems throughout the weekend. I now need to look at the data to understand why this happened, because at the moment we are not where we want to be. »

Ross Brawn

Without a doubt, it is a disappointing qualifying session for the team. We thought we would be more competitive, but the car did not perform as well as we had hoped today. The fundamentals are good, but we have a lot of challenges this weekend to allow us to make the most of it. We are in a good position for tomorrow’s race given the tire wear, and the car is reasonably fast in the long runs, so we will see what happens.