Kamui Kobayashi was at a loss to explain why Sauber were so far off the pace in Friday Practice ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix. The Japanese driver was fifteenth this afternoon and says the team need to find a solution to be competitive in qualifying.
“The weather today was a kind of surprise. We had such a packed programme and I really would have preferred two dry sessions, because we still have a lot of work to do. For some reason we struggled in the morning. We don't understand our poor performance in dry conditions yet and have to investigate that. We were fast on the wet track but I think that is not worth anything when I look at the weather forecast.”
Teammate Sergio Perez was even slower, ending the day in eighteenth, although his performance was masked by a brake problem which prevented him from running the soft tyres before the rain came.
“It was a difficult day. I am not happy yet with my car. We need to look at the data now and we need a good third free practice session tomorrow. However, on the time sheets it looked particularly bad for me in FP2 because I didn't manage to go out on soft tyres after a brake problem needed to be fixed in the garage.”
Head of Track Engineering Giampaolo Dall'Ara was frustrated to see the weather disrupt the session the way it did and is nervous about the team's chances tomorrow.
“The session was not the easiest to manage with the rain. Overall there's quite a lot of work for us to do with regard to performance as well as reliability. We had some reliability issues on Sergio's car, which cost him some running time. It was easier here to get the intermediates tyre to work than in Hockenheim, but also here half of the track was quite dry. In completely dry conditions we are definitely not where we want to be with regard to the lap time, so we have to analyse all the data tonight and draw the right conclusions.”
