Pastor Maldonado admits Williams aren’t where they’d like to be after Friday’s running at the Korean Grand Prix. The Venezuelan was a disappointing eighteenth this afternoon despite putting in 33 laps, citing a problem with his car for the lack of pace. Maldonado was 2.3 seconds down on pacesetter Sebastian Vettel today and admits the team must get on top of their own issues in order to close the gap.
“It was a difficult day today which means we have a lot of work to do before qualifying. The track is quite challenging anyway, but we had some problems in the car this afternoon which we now need to analyse to make sure we can resolve them before tomorrow.”
Teammate Bruno Senna fared slightly better, going twelfth fastest, on a circuit that hasn’t been kind to him in the past and remains hopeful that he can reach Q3 tomorrow.
“It was a productive day for me. Missing the first session wasn’t ideal because I’m not so familiar with this track and my experience here in the last two years has been hampered by rain. But in the end I think we got a good idea of the direction we need to go to improve. It’s going to be very tough, we can see that in low fuel situations some cars are faster than others, so we need to improve on that, but I’m confident that we can start the race further up the grid.”
Senna was replaced by Valtteri Bottas once again in FP1 and the Finn admitted Yeongam took longer than other circuits to acclimatise to.
“It took quite a few laps to get into the rhythm today. It’s a new track for me so I was just learning the corners and the feel of the track initially. I did my best lap time on the last lap as I couldn’t get everything out of the car in the first two sessions when the tyres might have been best. But again, a very positive session for me and the team – we managed to complete all our planned tests and got some good data that we will now analyse and learn from.”
