Bruno Senna - Photo Credit: Andrew Ferraro/LAT Photographic
Bruno Senna impressed his home fans today in Brazil after getting his Renault through into Q3 and qualifying ninth for tomorrow’s grand prix.
This performance was made more impressive by the fact that team-mate Vitaly Petrov could qualify only fifteenth.
“I'm very happy with that,” said Senna. “It was not what I was expecting when the weekend started but it's good news. We knew the car had good potential here, but we just weren't sure the level of that potential – the R31 behaved very well today! In qualifying 2, the team put a good car together and we did a great job.
“It's a shame we had used tyres going into Q3 because we could have had an even better result. Having said that, being in Q3 was a victory in itself.”
Petrov had a few excuses for the mis-match in results today: “I'm naturally disappointed with my position because we have been improving the car step by step throughout the weekend and we thought there was more to come from it,” said the Russian. “We changed the car set-up quite a lot to accommodate for the change in temperature between FP3 and qualifying.
“As for qualifying itself, I didn't actually feel I made many mistakes; I had quite a quick lap at the end of Q1 but then I lost some grip on my lap in Q2, which left me where it did.”
