Pic happy to outqualify Lotus and Marussias
Charles Pic put in a strong qualifying performance as he managed to put his car in 18th place for tomorrow's race, ahead of Grosjean, the Marussia cars and his teammate. Van der Garde meanwhile rued a mistake and a yellow flag from failing to do better than the slowest time of the session.
Charles Pic: “It’s been a pretty good day for me. We changed the plan for FP3 when the session was delayed and continued the progress we made yesterday with a decent balance for quali. That worked out well in Q1 as it meant I had a car I could really push with and ending up ahead of a Lotus and both Marussias means we’ve achieved today’s target.
“I think the race is going to be really interesting. We haven’t had any running yet in the sort of temperatures we’re expecting for tomorrow so we really don’t know too much about how the tyres will degrade, but we found a good balance yesterday on the long runs on both dry compounds and we have a lot of sets left so we can maybe try something different with the strategy. Even though this track is tough on wear rates on the tyres we’ve been able to look after them pretty well and that gives us options for the race that we can work on tonight.”
Giedo van der Garde: “FP3 was good for me, even though it was obviously cut short, but we found a balance for quali on the inters and managed to get a couple of laps in on the supersofts at the end.
“After a good FP3 quali really didn’t go to plan. We went out early on inters, one of the first on track, and the times kept coming down as the dry line started to appear, but it was never right for slicks as it had been at the last race in Monaco. We went onto a new set of inters with a few minutes left but then, on my quickest lap I made a pretty big mistake that cost me about 1.5 seconds, and then on my final lap I had to back off for a yellow flag and that meant I couldn’t put in a really representative time. It’s a shame as the car felt good and I’m enjoying the circuit, particularly in these sorts of conditions, but we know we have decent race pace so we’ll put today behind us and move onto Sunday.”
