Mixed fortunes with Honda qualifying

The Honda Racing F1 Team's Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button will start tomorrow's British Grand Prix in 14th and 18th positions after a disappointing qualifying in front of the team's home crowd. Rubens got a good run in the first of the three shoot-out sessions and made it through to Q2, during which he was able to extract the maximum performance from the car today. Jenson's Q1 was frustrated by traffic and a yellow flag and he was unable to get a clean lap to make it through to Q2.

"I got the maximum possible performance from the car during the second qualifying session today. It was a really good lap and I pushed as hard as possible. However at the moment, even one-tenth of a second can mean the difference between finishing at the top or bottom of the tight group that we are competing with right now. The team performed really well today, the set-up of the car was good and I felt happy with the balance, but unfortunately we just do not have the pace to get into Q3."

"What can I say? I'm obviously massively disappointed with the way qualifying went, here at Silverstone, in front of my home crowd. On my first run I got traffic from one of the BMW Saubers. Then in the second I let Anthony through because he was on a quick lap. He went off which brought the yellow flags out and that was that. As ever in this situation, the race is going to be a tough one, made all the more difficult here. We will just have to do what we can from where we are."

"Rubens gave it everything he had, so it is somewhat frustrating to finish 14th when we were only 0.2 sec from a top ten position. That's the way it goes nowadays because the field is so tight. Jenson was quite happy with his car balance but lifted for Anthony who had spun off and therefore did not make it through to Q2."