Italian GP: Qualifying notes - Williams

08/09/2012

Pastor Maldonado qualified 12th for tomorrow's Italian Grand Prix with a time 1:24.820. A 10-place grid penalty incurred from the Belgium GP means that he will start from 22nd on the grid. Bruno Senna qualified in 14th, posting a time of 1:25.042.

Pastor Maldonado: It wasn't the best day for our car today as we were struggling a bit for pace and then in the last Q2 lap I didn't quite put everything together. Everything is so close here though and it will be a tough race, but we've done a fair amount of testing on higher fuel so I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do.

Bruno Senna: I think we are more competitive on the harder compound tyre because for some reason we didn't seem to pick up a lot of grip on the medium tyres, so we need to look into that further. We have the race pace and the track does allow for some overtaking so I think we could both have a chance of scoring points. It's very tight here at Monza but it's a long race. I'm looking forward to racing around this brilliant track.

Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer: After a decent third practice this morning we were hopeful of a reasonable qualifying session, but unfortunately we didn't quite have the pace to make it through into Q3, with Pastor and Bruno finishing in 12th and 14th respectively. Conditions tomorrow should be similar to today's and we need to attack hard in the race with our aim still to get the cars home in the points.

Check out our Qualifying gallery, here.