23 JULY 2011
Timo and Jérôme qualify well on a freezing cold Nürburgring
It certainly didn't feel like summer in Germany, with temperatures at the Nürburgring struggling to reach 14 degrees today. Fortunately, our team jackets are highly effective at keeping out the cold, so we didn't need to stand too close to the tyre warmers to maintain body temperature.
In FP3, we focused as usual on Primes to start with, refining the set-up that the engineers had evolved yesterday evening before moving on to a qualifying simulation on Options late in the session. Timo and Jérôme were separated by less than two tenths and were classified 20th and 22nd.
Qualifying produced the same result, after both drivers ran two stints of six laps, starting each run with a fresh set of Options. As is so often the case, it was the very last laps that were the fastest, and Timo moved up to 20th with the lap that he had started with only eight seconds remaining in the session.
It's been a very smooth weekend so far, and the whole team is looking forward to the race tomorrow.
Timo Glock
“The car was not easy to drive today, by any means. We had the same problem in Silverstone in similarly windy conditions and our car is just very sensitive to that. We have to understand why because without the little mistakes, too much oversteer and being too much over the limit to trying to get the maximum out of the car, we could have been four or five tenths quicker. I was pushing hard and I drove a good lap I think. I just want to get more out of the car. We still managed to split the Lotus cars and in better conditions I think we could have a good race, so we will see what tomorrow brings. The fans have been great here and thanks to them for their support in my home race.”
Jérôme D’Ambrosio
“I think it was a pretty good qualifying session for me today. I didn't quite manage to get the maximum out of the car on my fastest lap, and as we have to use the same set-up for the race tomorrow it wasn't ideal for qualifying anyway. But I'm very pleased to have had a smooth Saturday; we've had no rain and no bad luck. As a result we have a good consistent pace so I'm looking forward to tomorrow.”
John Booth
“We spent a lot of time last night going through all of the information we had collected during Friday, paying particular attention to the aerodynamic data. As a result of this, we made some quite significant changes to both cars overnight. The drivers were happy with these and were able to work on further set-up improvements during FP3. We seem to be starting to understand where some of our issues lie, particularly during the last two race weekends when we’ve experienced cold track temperatures and windy conditions. These aren’t suiting our car at present but we will keep working to solve these issues. We chose to do two long runs during the qualifying session to take advantage of the Option tyres that are being so consistent. Both drivers did a good job today managing the traffic and we achieved a good result, ending up with one car in front of a Lotus. We are happy with today’s performance and we look forward to tomorrow’s race.”
Credit: Virgin Racing (www.virginracing.com)
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