Saturday: Petrov satisfied, Senna at fault at Lotus Renault GP
While they have nothing left to hope for in this end of the season, the British team achieves a decent qualifying session. For Vitaly Petrov, Q3 was not within reach; for Bruno Senna, there was room for improvement, and a mistake cost him a better position on the grid.
Vitaly Petrov – 14th and 12th
« We started the weekend badly, with some mechanical problems yesterday. From there, we were struggling against it, especially on a circuit where we don’t expect to be well-ranked. To be honest, today we got the maximum out of our car. We couldn’t expect any miracles, and I’m happy with twelfth place on the grid because I know the team and I did everything we could: achieving a competitive lap on this circuit is tricky. Tomorrow will be a demanding day for us. People say tire degradation will be less significant than on many tracks, but I’m not sure. I think it could play an important role. The race will be long, and we will need to make the right tactical choices to leave here with something positive. »
Bruno Senna – 11th and 14th
« I’m disappointed because I made a mistake in my last lap and lost a lot of time. It was really difficult to achieve a solid lap, and unfortunately, I couldn’t put myself in the position I wanted. I really felt I could be eleventh. At least the tire sets only did one lap each, which should be a good thing for the race. Hopefully, my position won’t handicap me too much tomorrow. I’m looking forward to the race; it’s a very exciting place to drive, and I will give my best. »
Alan Permane, Director of Track Operations:
We knew we would struggle this weekend with respect to our car and the circuit. This season, we haven’t performed well on tracks with predominantly slow corners. We thought we could just hit below the top ten and that’s exactly where we finished. 11th and 12th were possible, but Q3 was out of our reach today.
Without a small mistake, Bruno could have finished very, very, very close to Vitaly. But I think you can say the same for the whole pack. Everyone could have gained a little, so I don’t think it should be given more importance than that.
It’s typical here, the further the day goes on the cooler it gets. We anticipated it and chose to do series of three laps on soft tires in Q2. I believe it was the right method since the third laps were faster. Bruno felt capable of doing it in one lap because he could warm up his tires a bit better than Vitaly.
The race looks complicated, but we will do our best to score points. We need to think tonight about what we can do to extract the maximum from what appears to be a challenging day. Quite simply, we are where we are due to our pace. We will need a good dose of luck or the help of a few opponents who might not finish. But above all, we must focus on delivering the strongest possible race, and the rest will come naturally.
