Saturday: Van der Garde hits the jackpot for Caterham

Giedo van der Garde – 20th and 15th:

« I am obviously very happy to have my name appear on the timesheet in Q2 for the first time this year, and I would like to thank Tony [Fernandes], Cyril [Abiteboul], and the entire team for the work everyone put in today. Honestly, it’s a great feeling, but it’s still part of my learning process. I said at the beginning of the season that I would make progress, and today’s performance shows how far we’ve come in just six races, and there’s more to come.

Saturday started off quite well, and in Free Practice 3, we immediately went out for a very long stint on Soft tires, but, as with Charles [Pic], the car was understeering a lot. I had to use the throttle to make the car turn, so we made some mechanical changes, and from there it got better, but the tires didn’t really perform as we would have liked. So we tried something else for qualifying, and the results are quite promising.

In Q1, we went out very early when more rain was forecasted. It turned out that this wasn’t the case, but we stopped at the right time and we were able to do four fast laps on the Intermediates at the end of Q1, enough to allow me to move to Q2.

Q2 started with a bit more rain so we went out again on Intermediates, but after one lap I thought it was dry enough to switch to slicks, so we stopped to put on the Super Softs, which we were the first to do. For a while, we were virtually in Q3, but that’s not our place in terms of performance, so we’re already happy with Q2.

Sunday could be a very interesting day. I’m starting between the two Williams cars of Bottas and Maldonado, and I’ve had good starts all year, so let’s hope I can have another good start and avoid anything resembling the chaos that occurred in GP2 on Friday. From there, nothing is impossible. I finished on the podium here last year, in GP2, and even if that’s unlikely to happen again this year, we will certainly be battling with some cars all afternoon.

Charles Pic – 19th and 18th:

« First of all, I want to say congratulations to Giedo and the whole team for the work they did today. It’s obviously a bit disappointing not to have been able to be with my teammate in Q2, but it was very close and the team did a great job to give both of us a chance.

This morning, in Free Practice 3, I mostly suffered from understeer. We started the session with a long stint on softs and the car was understeering everywhere, so we spent most of the session trying to fix that and get a better balance for the car. Towards the end, it got better but even with the Super Softs, I still couldn’t get the most out of it.

In qualifying, we went out very early, the first on track, and we had a good stint on Intermediates with the times dropping as the session went on. We made the decision to come in and put on a new set of Intermediate tires with something like five minutes left in Q1, but, because of the traffic, I couldn’t really get everything out of it in the last sector, but 18th is still OK in Monaco. We have good pace on long stints and a very good level of tire degradation, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.