Brazilian Grand Prix Qualifying

Posted on Saturday 20 Oct 2007 and tagged with qualifying.

The ATT Williams team had a somewhat unsatisfactory qualifying session for Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix. In only his first experience of Formula One’s knockout qualifying format, Kazuki Nakajima was unable to progress further than round one and will start the race from the tenth row of the grid in P19. Nico Rosberg carried the team into the final stage of qualifying for the ninth time this season and will line up in tenth place for the final Grand Prix of this year’s Championship.

Nico Rosberg:
My engineers have done a good job improving the car throughout the weekend, particularly since this morning’s session, but I think we were still quite lucky to get into Q3 today. I nailed the lap in Q2; I couldn’t have got anything more out of the car. In Q3, with more fuel on board, I had a small balance problem and made a minor mistake too, which probably cost me a tenth or two. I could perhaps have just beaten Coulthard if everything had worked out perfectly, but you cannot always get the best out of a lap. I think we have to be pleased with where we are and just try to do our best tomorrow. We seem to be pretty strong over long runs, so we should be in good shape for the race.

Kazuki Nakajima:
It was difficult today. I don’t know why, but the car felt quite different in qualifying compared to this morning’s practice session and I couldn’t get it completely right. Combined with a couple of mistakes, qualifying was disappointing. I will now go and look at my data in comparison to Nico’s and see where I can improve for the race tomorrow.

Sam Michael, Technical Director:
Today’s result wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped for. In his debut outing, Kazuki was knocked out in the first round. In Nico’s case, we thought we could get a couple more positions out of Q3 but he didn’t have a perfect balance and that prevented him from qualifying any higher. Tomorrow’s race will be interesting and we’ll fight as hard as we can.