Team Principal Christian Horner congratulated Sebastian Vettel on ‘a great performance’ as he secured Red Bull‘s first ever pole position in Montreal and hailed a good recovery from Mark Webber has he took P4 on the Canada grid without the use of KERS.
“It's fantastic to get our first pole position in Montreal,” said Horner. “It was a great performance by Sebastian again today, completing two laps in Q3 that were good enough for pole. The Ferrari's have been very quick here and we expect them and McLaren to be a big challenge tomorrow.
“Mark made a good recovery without the benefit of KERS, which we know is worth a couple of tenths here. It was a great performance from him and he will start from the second row at a track where you can overtake.”
Vettel himself said that he was pleased with the victory, but is aware that turning pole into victory tomorrow will be difficult, especially with rain forecast:
“I'm happy with that,” said the reigning world champion. “We've made up some ground from last year when we committed to a different strategy and sacrificed qualifying, but this year I feel comfortable.
“I had a rough start yesterday morning, but thankfully the guys could fix the car and I had more practice in the afternoon, which is important here. It's a tricky track to understand, with the kerbs and the chicanes, coming from high speeds with hard braking, but we had a smooth qualifying session today and two very good runs.
“All in all, I'm very happy. It's obviously a big step we've made today, but the big task comes tomorrow. The conditions are likely to change and I'm sure we'll see some rain – the question is when and how much. We'll see, but P1 is the best position to start from.”
Webber was happy with his performance in qualifying, admitting that, without KERS, fourth on the grid was all he could realistically achieve today.
“It was a good afternoon and I was happy with how we recovered,” he said. “I couldn't have got much more out ofthe car for qualifying today; I didn't have KERS, which affected my performance. The guys did everything they could to get it ready after the problem we had this morning and we were confident that it was fixed, but on the formation lap it lapsed again. We tried to recover it for Q3, but it wasn't possible.
“A front row would have been nice to have here, but fourth is towards the front and the second row is good considering our day. It's a long Grand Prix tomorrow and there's likely to be a bit of weather coming in, so it should be an interesting race.”
