Canadian GP: Qualifying notes - Marussia

09/06/2012

The weather in Montreal took a turn for the better today, but qualifying for tomorrow's Canadian Grand Prix did not yield the hoped-for reversal in fortunes for the Marussia F1 Team.

Overnight the team had worked on improving the balance of the cars and further analysis of the lower downforce package, before confirming the base settings for today. These were challenged in FP3 this morning, which confirmed that the engineers had opted for the best direction and that the remaining time would be best spent improving the balance shift that goes hand in hand with a reduction in downforce.

Timo Glock: "Not a great qualifying for us in the end. We have to understand why we didn't gain any time with the second set of tyres, which felt a little strange straight out of the box. They did not have the same grip as the first set and I wasn't able to push in the same way for the first flying lap. The second flying lap was only quicker because on the first, in the last chicane, I made a little mistake when I had to slow down at the chicane because of the car in front of me. A bit of a shame because the gap was closer than that, but now we have to focus on what we can do to reverse that tomorrow."

Charles Pic: "I'm reasonably comfortable with how things went for me today. It is always harder at a track that you haven't raced at before and where you've spent your time so far mainly getting to know it and learning its characteristics rather than spending more time improving the car. Certainly there is room for improvement in sector 1 and a little bit in sector 2. Sector 3 was not too bad. I hope we can find a bit more early on in the lap in tomorrow's race and get both cars to the finish."

John Booth, Team Principal: "There is no doubt that it was a disappointing qualifying session for us today. However, whilst the timesheet reflects the fact that our pace to our nearest competitors seems weaker at this event, we know from the last few weeks that our race pace has been significantly better than our qualifying pace. We are beginning to get a better understanding of why this is, but it will take some time and our planned upgrades to the car to improve the overall package. For now though, we will at least have the opportunity to improve our form in the race tomorrow and that is our focus overnight whilst honing our race strategy."

Check out our Qualifying gallery, here.