Fernando Alonso revealed that the Renault team “had a few doubts about reaching Q3” ahead of this afternoons qualifying session, but was pleased with the overall performance in the end.
“In the end we missed being in fourth or fifth position by a very small amount. I hope to have a good start of the race tomorrow and gain some places using the KERS.” he said
Team-mate Romain Grosjean had his best qualifying performance so far in his short F1 career as when he finished in 12th place, narrowly missing out of getting through to Q3.
“This is my best performance in qualifying so far.” said Grosjean. “Of course, I would have preferred to make it through to Q3, but I think I can be happy with my performance today. For tomorrow, the KERS should help us at the start of the race. My aim will be to finish in the top ten and if I can score some points I will be very happy.”
Pat Symonds, Executive Director of Engineering was also happy with the teams performance saying “Today we had a very exciting qualifying session with Fernando in eighth place and just missing fifth by six hundredths of a second.”
He went on to talk about the strategies that other team look to be taking and how they can take advantage of the situation, “We can see already that there is going to be a number of one-stop strategies in this race so a lot will come down to management of the car and the tyres. Romain was very unlucky not to get through to Q3. His last lap was looking very promising but a small mistake kept him out by a couple of tenths. We are now looking forward to a good race tomorrow.”
