15 OCTOBER 2011
Timo and Jérôme qualify 21st and 22nd on a dry Korean circuit
This afternoon’s qualifying session ended with Timo and Jérôme classified 21st and 22nd.
In contrast to yesterday, bright and sunny skies greeted us this morning. Timo and Jérôme were able to test the Soft and Supersoft tyres on a dry track as well as preparing for qualifying and tomorrow’s race. Timo completed 19 laps and Jérôme, 16.
At the start of Qualifying, with a dry track at a temperature of 29°C and the air temperature at 23°C, Jérôme was first out of the garage followed by Timo three minutes later, both on the Supersoft tyres. In the dying minutes of the session, Jérôme was back on track for his second run with only 3:30 minutes remaining, whilst Timo opted to cut things even finer with only 2:27 on the clock when he exited the garage.
Timo Glock, Race Driver #24
“It’s been a great weekend so far and today went very smoothly compared to the last few weekends where we had a few more set-up troubles. The car was very good in wet conditions yesterday, which made me very comfortable for today, because if the car is very good in the wet it should also be good in the dry – and it was this morning, straight from the first lap. We just fine-tuned the set-up as for us there is quite a lot of grip here and that suits the car. I got a good qualifying lap; a slight mistake into turn 5 which cost me a bit of time, but in general today we are 0.9s from Team Lotus. The team did a good job and in particular my engineers worked well together to get everything right. Now we have to focus on looking after the tyres over a race distance and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
Jérôme D’Ambrosio, Race Driver #25
“It wasn’t a good day for me. The pace is not there and it’s been like that all weekend. There’s obviously something going wrong, even though we’re not sure where it’s coming from yet so we will have to analyse and try to understand it before tomorrow.”
John Booth, Team Principal
“This morning’s FP3 was a very busy session as a consequence of the weather conditions we experienced yesterday. Both drivers stepped through a quick-fire series of set-up changes and overall they ended the session reasonably happy. They were suffering from some understeer and having spent some time looking through the data and examining the tyres we could see some evidence of where this was coming from. Going into qualifying, Jérôme retained his set-up, while Timo made a few adjustments to his. Both drivers got good, clean opening laps in what was a planned three-lap run. They embarked on their crucial final runs having planned to complete only one and two flying laps respectively. Jérôme didn’t seem to find the big improvement on the second run and we will go through the data from the car to understand if there is anything obvious. On a more positive note, Timo achieved a good lap, which he is happy with. It was obviously quite a surprise to see some of the top runners fitting the option tyre for Q1 and that may give us some clues as to what we can expect tomorrow in terms of tyre choice.”
Credit: Marussia Virgin Racing (www.marussiavirginracing.com)
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