Chinese GP Qualifying

Posted on Saturday 18 Oct 2008 and tagged with china.

The AT&T Williams team endured a difficult qualifying session, with neither Nico Rosberg nor Kazuki Nakajima progressing into Q3. With one sector on the circuit proving particularly problematic, it was impossible to maintain a consistently strong pace across a lap and as a consequence, Nico will start tomorrow’s race from 15th and Kazuki from 17th.

Nico Rosberg:
It’s very dispiriting to be starting the race in 15th place like last weekend in Japan. I gave everything in the sessions and extracted the maximum out of the car, but it just didn’t come together today. As a consequence, tomorrow’s race will be difficult starting from this far back. Apparently it may rain, and if that happens, it may help us to achieve a better result. We will all be doing our best to have a stronger performance tomorrow.

Kazuki Nakajima:
I knew it would be quite difficult today in qualifying from my experience during P3 this morning. There were some points on the track where I really needed to improve, but I didn’t manage to make any headway during qualifying. Of course the outcome is not what I wanted, but I guess I now need to try harder to improve in the race itself.

Rod Nelson, Senior Operations Engineer:
Naturally it was a below par qualifying session. This circuit shows up the main deficiency in the car, which we have improved but not corrected - we are slow in sector two, which is made up of high-speed corners, so with this in mind, we have probably done the best we can in the circumstances. Looking forward to tomorrow, the weather forecast is a little  variable and it is possible that there may be some rain, which might mix things up a bit.