Pastor Maldonado produced the stand-out performance in qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix, securing second on the grid alongside Lewis Hamilton. The Venezuelan hasn’t been on the front row since his maiden pole at Barcelona and is desperate to add to his points tally which hasn’t changed since that weekend.
“We’ve been working really hard as at the beginning of the weekend we were struggling for pace. We continued improving throughout qualifying and we found a good balance in the car. I then had to put together a good lap in Q3 and I knew we could be right up at the front. I’m really looking forward to the race as we’ve shown consistently good pace on our longer runs throughout practice. We have all the tools to be competitive tomorrow, so it should be a good race for us.”
Williams teammate Bruno Senna had a nightmare session though, making contact with the wall on the exit of turn 21 and damaging his suspension. As a result, the Brazilian will start seventeenth and knows he will have to go some to score points.
“It wasn’t ideal today. I was pushing very hard to get a good lap but I pushed a little over the edge. This place isn’t very forgiving so we broke the rear suspension. Unfortunately that brought an early end to qualifying but we now we need to focus on tomorrow. We have extra sets of new tyres now which I think everyone is going to need. We have a good car and it’s a long race. It isn’t easy to overtake here but we’ve raced from the back before. I’m going to need to push really hard to get some points out the race tomorrow.”
