Jérôme D'Ambrosio has been having a tricky weekend so far in Korea, and today in qualifying his fastest lap was nearly 1.5 seconds slower than that of team-mate Timo Glock.
The Belgian driver still managed to qualify in P22, ahead of the two HRT drivers, but was not at all happy with his performance. “It wasn't a good day for me,” said D’Ambrosio. “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.”
In contrast, Glock was much more happy with how he performed, despite his fastest lap in Q1 being nearly a second slower than Jarno Trulli, who qualified just ahead of him.
“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,” said the German. “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.”