Saturday Report – Super Aguri split between Sato and Davidson

After their home GP last weekend, the Super-Aguri team flew to China, where they hope to maintain their advantage over Honda in the constructors’ championship.

For the time being, in both the qualifying session and the last part of the morning’s free practice, Davidson consistently outpaced his teammate Sato. The latter struggled with poor grip and could not exceed 20th place today, thus he will start from the penultimate row tomorrow. Davidson, on the other hand, had better sensations with a 15th place finish.

Takuma Sato – 20th and 20th

“I am very unsatisfied with the car because I had no grip. I couldn’t perform well throughout the entire qualifying session for this reason. Various things were tried to rectify this, but we never solved the problem and we then ran out of running time.”

“We then estimated that we had to make a radical setup change to try to improve the performance for the qualifying session; however, the result was identical. There is very little we can do before tomorrow’s race, but we really need to understand this problem.”

Anthony Davidson – 15th and 15th

“It was a very satisfying day. I doubted our ability to reach Q2 after our performance on Friday, but the track slowly improved, and I managed to make it out of Q1. The tires obviously improved throughout the qualifying session, the car’s balance was better, and I was able to successfully reach Q2.”

“Due to the high probability of rain tomorrow, we are still uncertain about our strategy, but I think we have a perfectly acceptable setup, so I look forward to the race.”

Graham Taylor – sporting director

“It was initially a normal morning where we worked to our maximum. It became clear that Takuma was struggling with his car, but Anthony was making progress, and his efforts paid off in qualifying.”

“This was an excellent result by Anthony, allowing us to reach Q2 once again. We explored another option with Takuma before qualifying, but it has yet to yield the expected reward from a lap time perspective, and we need to understand why.”