Red Bull split strategy for Indian GP
Red Bull Racing's Sebastian Vettel has taken yet another pole position and bettered the lap record around Buddh Circuit. Mark Webber qualified 4th as he chose to start the race on the medium tyre.
Sebastian Vettel, 1st: “The car felt good all weekend and it just got better as the track improved. The car was amazing; it’s a great circuit, I really like the flow of it, especially around the middle sector with the high speed corners. If the car behaves the way you want it to through that section then you’re always then going to enjoy it, as we did today. It’s a great result for the team; Mark is on a different strategy, so we’ll see what the race brings tomorrow. We have been getting a lot of questions about the Championship this weekend, but we’ll keep doing what we’ve done in the past, just focusing on every single step – we won’t change that for tomorrow, or the next couple of races. We’ve worked hard to get here and tomorrow is a long race. With the strategy, I think it’s always tricky do the right thing, but we have a good package so we should be in good shape.”
Mark Webber, 4th: “We thought it was worth trying something a little bit different with the strategy today, so that’s why we ran the primes in Q3. We thought we would probably be a bit further back than the second row to be honest, so it turned out to be a good session for us. It’s not easy to manage the primes when you just get a look at them in Q3, but I think we did a good job and we didn’t leave too much out there. We’re in a good position to capitalise on a different approach tomorrow. The option tyre (used by the first three cars) shouldn’t last too long and we’ll be on a different strategy. That said, I’ll still have to use the softer tyre in the race at some point, so let’s see.”
Christian Horner, Team Principal: “A great team performance. We took a strategic approach to final qualifying with the two cars running on different tyre compounds. It was a fantastic first lap by Sebastian to secure the pole position, his third in succession here. Mark backed that up with fourth and, as the first of the hard tyre runners, he’s in a very strong position. It’s a terrific result for both cars for tomorrow’s race, where they’ll be effectively running different strategies; it should be a fascinating grand prix.”
Thierry Salvi, Renault engine support: “Mark and Seb did a great job in qualifying, with Sebastian scoring pole with a fantastic lap and Mark in fourth place on the Prime tyres, which is a particularly impressive performance. All weekend have tried to manage the tyre degradation through optimizing the driveability maps. We know the race tomorrow will be a big challenge and the team did the best possible strategy to be able to run both types of tyres at the start of the race. Everyone here knows the objective of the weekend and we are pushing hard to achieve it.”
