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Saturday Qualifying


By Andrew Cutler
March 11 2012

Since everyone in the paddock is worried about tire wear this weekend, I have to admit that my first thought after qualifying wrapped up was; "Did STR just 'borrow' against tomorrow (by using up too many sets of 'soft' tires) for a strong showing today?" To this point, I can find no reports that would seem to indicate that this was the case.

The day started off well for Ricciardo and Vergne, who notched the 8th & 12th best times in FP3, respectively. Then came one of the most unusal qualifying sessions that I can remember seeing in quite some time. Unfortunately, things didn't work out so well for JEV, who could not advance out of Q1 - and then missed the FIA's call for a post-qualy inspection!

Daniel, on the other hand, kept soldiering on, making it all the way to Q3, thanks in part to taking a second run in the closing minuets of Q2; something that STR had initially indicated that they would'nt do. In the final session they sent Ricciardo out for one flying lap on used 'soft' tires, and he responded admirably, posting a lap at just under 1:33: Good enough for the 6th grid spot.

This will be STR's best GP starting spot since last season in Belgium.

Here are the team's post qualifications comments:

Daniel Ricciardo:  

“It feels very good and I am very happy with that result. We had a below average week in China with some updates we brought. We persisted with them and we made them work significantly better here, which is down to the hard work of the whole team. ... It’s not always you have a day like this, so I can enjoy the moment, bearing in mind that it’s tomorrow that counts. Now we have to put it all together for the race and tonight we will be looking at all our strategy options regarding tyres. It helps to go into a race feeling confidence and starting from sixth, I have to focus on scoring as many points as possible, as this is the best chance we have had so far. I hope I am still smiling tomorrow evening."

Jean-Eric Vergne:

“I do not understand why I was so slow this afternoon, especially as the car was going well this morning and as can be seen from Daniel’s impressive performance. Well done to him. I am keen to get back to the engineers to look at the data and find out why I could not deliver the performance I was hoping for. The track was three degrees warmer this afternoon than in the morning, but I don’t think it was down to that. I’ve started from the lower half of the grid before and then managed to have a good race, so given that I think the car has the potential, that is what I plan to do tomorrow.”

Laurent Mekies, (Chief Engineer):

“The most positive aspect of today is that we seem to have understood the reasons why we were quite slow last week in China. We came here with a few possible solutions and it seems to have delivered reasonable results. ... Daniel has secured a fantastic result after driving very well all weekend, making no mistakes. However, it did not go our way with Jean-Eric, but hopefully we can work together to deliver something better tomorrow, as he has already produced some good races from low down the grid. ... Finally, a big thank you to everyone, here at the track, at the factory in Faenza and the wind tunnel in Bicester, we are coming to the end of a long and intense four race stint and it is good to see that all the hard work from everyone has delivered such a positive result today.”

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