Front row start for Button
The Honda Racing F1 Team enjoyed an exceptional qualifying session at Imola today, with Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello putting in very strong performances behind the wheel of their RA106s. Jenson ended the three-segment session in second place, with Rubens only 0.2s slower in third, making this easily the team’s strongest qualifying performance of the year. It is Jenson’s third front row start of 2006, giving him the best average qualifying position of all the drivers on the grid.
Both drivers were inside the top 10 in all three qualifying segments. In segment one, Jenson was sixth and Rubens ninth; in segment two, they were eighth and ninth respectfully, and they both set their fastest times of the day in segment three. Jenson’s time of 1:22.988s was less than 0.2s behind polesitter Michael Schumacher.
Today’s performance is just reward for the team’s engineers, who made a lot of changes to the set-up of the RA106s last night. The drivers complained of handling problems in yesterday’s free practice sessions and, as was the case at the Malaysian Grand Prix last month, the engineers succeeded in significantly improving the balance of the cars overnight.
Jenson has finished the San Marino on the podium for the last two years, and the team looks forward to converting these encouraging starting positions into strong performances in tomorrow’s 62-lap race.
Jenson Button “I’m very pleased with the result today and to see both of us in the top three is great for the team. The car was a lot better in qualifying than this morning and the first half of the weekend generally, especially in terms of grip and with the handling over the kerbs. We did a lot of work overnight and through this morning and I’m much happier for the race. We’ll have to see how things pan out though because we won’t know until then what everyone has been doing through free practice but I think we should feel quite confident. The team has done a great job in addressing the issues from Australia and I think we can have a good race tomorrow.”
Rubens Barrichello “I’m obviously delighted with qualifying today and I have to say a very big thank you to everyone in the team for their hard work in helping me to achieve this result. We have had some problems in the early races but today’s qualifying shows the amount of effort we have all put into getting the car more to my liking has paid off. We’ve had two very good tests to get ready for this race and the team has really been listening to me about what I need for things to improve. I’m much happier with the car now. It’s not 100% but we’re getting there and I think we can have a much better race tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it.”
