European GP Qualifying

Posted on Saturday 22 Aug 2009 and tagged with valencia, europe.

In sweltering conditions today at the Valencia Street Circuit, Nico Rosberg drove his FW31 through Q1 and Q2 and into the final round of qualifying in which he set the seventh fastest lap time. Team mate, Kazuki Nakajima, endured a frustrating afternoon caused by an as yet unidentified fault which prompted his engine to shutdown in the midst of Q1. Kazuki will therefore line up on the ninth row of the grid despite showing strong pace throughout the practice sessions.

Nico Rosberg:
Qualifying was generally ok. I’m in P7 with quite a lot of fuel, possibly more than anybody else around me, so I have a strong strategy for the race. There was no point in trying to out qualify the cars with KERS because they will overtake me off the line anyway. I’d prefer to qualify behind them, have more fuel on board and then beat them in the race. This track suits our car so we could have a points-scoring race tomorrow.

Kazuki Nakajima:
We had a failure on my car which caused the engine to cut out during Q1 so I didn’t have a chance to show what we could do. It’s a shame because I think we were strong enough to have been in the top ten today. We have a good race pace, so I just need to use that to my advantage and do my best tomorrow.

Rod Nelson, Chief Operations Engineer:
Today was obviously disappointing for Kazuki. We are still looking into the problem which stopped him out on the circuit, but we do know it wasn’t driver error. We are reasonably pleased with where we are with Nico. He’s on the clean side of the grid, which is a large advantage here. He’ll have KERS cars on the dirty side next to him, but hopefully we’ll stay ahead of them this time. We’re happy with the strategy we’ve chosen.