Singapore GP: Qualifying notes - Williams

22/09/2012

Pastor Maldonado will start on the front row of the grid for the Singapore Grand Prix tomorrow night. Pastor drove a great lap to qualify second, posting a time of 1:46.804. Bruno Senna qualified in 17th after touching the wall on his supersoft tyre run in Q2 and damaging the rear suspension on his FW34. The team are now working to repair his car ahead of tomorrow's race.

Pastor Maldonado: We've been working really hard as at the beginning of the weekend we were struggling for pace. We continued improving throughout qualifying and we found a good balance in the car. I then had to put together a good lap in Q3 and I knew we could be right up at the front. I'm really looking forward to the race as we've shown consistently good pace on our longer runs throughout practice. We have all the tools to be competitive tomorrow, so it should be a good race for us.

Bruno Senna: It wasn't ideal today. I was pushing very hard to get a good lap but I pushed a little over the edge. This place isn't very forgiving so we broke the rear suspension. Unfortunately that brought an early end to qualifying but we now we need to focus on tomorrow. We have extra sets of new tyres now which I think everyone is going to need. We have a good car and it's a long race. It isn't easy to overtake here but we've raced from the back before. I'm going to need to push really hard to get some points out the race tomorrow.

Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer: Pastor's superb front row qualifying result brings a very welcome boost to the whole team and places Pastor in a strong position to fight for a podium position tomorrow. After safely making it through the first qualifying session unfortunately Bruno hit the wall in the second session damaging his rear suspension leaving him out of position in 17th for tomorrow's race.

Check out our Qualifying gallery, here.