Strong qualifying session from Trulli
It has already been a very smooth weekend for Toyota. The team had his best qualifying of the season so far as Jarno Trulli placed his car in 5th position on tomorrow's grid while team mate Timo Glock will start from 10th.
Jarno Trulli (Car 11, Chassis TF108-02)
Summary: Quickest in Q1 on the way to 5th place PROVISIONAL GRID: 5th
FP3 4th Best Lap Time: 1m 35.389s (+0.370s) Laps: 20
Q1 1st Best Lap Time: 1m 35.205s (quickest) Laps: 6
Q2 7th Best Lap Time: 1m 34.825s (+0.637s) Laps: 6
Q3 5th Best Lap Time: 1m 36.711s (+0.963s) Laps: 6
“This has been quite a satisfying weekend so far. We have run without problems and the car has performed well and looked competitive. Today’s lap time just shows that it’s a big improvement compared to last year’s car. So we are all very pleased with this result and it is definitely looking good for tomorrow’s race. Timo has also done a very good job over the weekend too so I’m pleased for him because this gives a lot of motivation for the whole team to push hard with development work to improve the car. I’m confident for tomorrow because I’ve always performed well at this track. We just have to make sure that we finish the race without trouble because I believe we can score good points.”
Timo Glock (Car 12, Chassis TF108-01)
Summary: Safely through to Q3 and row five PROVISIONAL GRID: 10th
FP3 10th Best Lap Time: 1m 35.911s (+0.892s) Laps: 21
Q1 11th Best Lap Time: 1m 35.891s (+0.686s) Laps: 10
Q2 9th Best Lap Time: 1m 35.000s (+0.812s) Laps: 6
Q3 10th Best Lap Time: 1m 39.656s (+3.908s) Laps: 4
“I’m happy to have made Q3 but that was a difficult qualifying for me. In free practice this morning I had a better feeling for the option tyres in a qualifying set-up but this afternoon I struggled to get the most out of them again. It was difficult to find the right set-up for it. In the end I was happy that I had a really good lap and a really good last sector to get into the top ten. Now we have to see how the weather goes but if it’s dry it will be hard for me to get the most out of the tyres. This is a really wide circuit and that means there are more possibilities to overtake. But I’m keeping a lid on my expectations. Hopefully we can finish in the top ten or break into the points. That would be a good result.”
Pascal Vasselon, Senior General Manager Chassis: “So far the weekend has gone reasonably smoothly – including the weather, which was uncertain before qualifying. The threat of rain was there from the very beginning because showers were developing randomly in the area around the circuit but it stayed dry and did not disturb qualifying. Jarno’s qualifying position is what we expected so we are very happy with that. Today confirms yesterday’s practice where we saw that he was in very good shape both on one-lap performance and long runs, which we will check tomorrow. Timo also did a very good job to make it into Q3 for the second time in two races. He is finding it hard to get the most out of the tyres but apart from that tyre handling has been quite straightforward. Both compounds are running without major problems like graining and blistering. So we can head into the race confident of converting this into a strong finish.”
