By nGO
March 18 2006

Sato and Ide benifit from their reliabilty and could start the malaysian Grand Prix 17th and 18th after a weekend which has so far, claimed many engines. But even the heads of F1 do not know who will start where until sunday.

Super Aguri qualify without any problems although both drivers are suffering from understeer, after setting the 21st and 22nd fastest lap times and not falling foul to any engine penalties, Sato and Ide will start tomorrow's race from 17th and 18th position.

The Super Aguri's engines are among those which have done the most laps of any race car so far in their two grand prix lives. Because of this there may be concern over the Honda engine as Barichello's has been demoted for an engine change. This weekend will see Super Aguri yet again going into unknown territory not knowing whether their cars can survive the end, but so far things look good.

Although suffering from understeer, Sato is optimistic after setting a best time of 1:39.011, but believes the high downforce circuit is hurting them more so then other grand prix, "I believe that we did the best job we could today and I think that we achieved the car's best performance. Unfortunately we are still struggling in the mid-sector due to understeer, but we are running reliably and will have both cars on the starting grid tomorrow which is great. This is a high down-force circuit so we knew that we would have a hard race in Sepang, but we shall do our best tomorrow and hopefully be able to bring our two cars home."

Ide is still unhappy with the balance of the car and felt he could have extracted more from qualifying after setting a best time of 1:40.720, "For qualifying the car ran better than it did this morning, but the balance is still not good enough. I went off the track during practice because I tried to push too much but during qualifying the handling of the car felt much better. It is hot but everybody is running in the same condition so it is not such a problem. I will talk to the engineers and see what we can do to improve the car's pace and I hope that I will be able to do better tomorrow and get to the checkered flag. I am really looking forward to my second race here in Sepang."