Charles Pic doesn’t feel there was any more he could have got out of the Caterham CT03 after qualifying twentieth in Malaysia. The Frenchman was nine tenths behind Marussia’s Jules Bianchi but felt that was the maximum he could achieve and admits he wouldn’t be disappointed with rain tomorrow.
“We had a very good FP3, really making progress, especially on the long runs, but I don’t think there was a lot more we could have done today in qualifying. I had a lot of understeer on my first run so we adjusted the pressures for the second run but I still couldn’t dial out the understeer so with the performance gap to the cars ahead we probably finished up about as well as we could have hoped. So now we focus on tomorrow. In FP3 we found a good direction to go in the race so I think it’s going to be interesting. It’ll almost certainly rain and I like it when the conditions are changing on track so let’s see what happens.”
Teammate Giedo van der Garde is also hoping for wet weather starting from last on the grid after struggling to find pace on the medium tyres this afternoon.
“Qualifying didn’t go well for me today to be honest. I’ve had an issue with a lot of oversteer on the option tyres all day and really couldn’t get them to work as well as they did at the last race and that obviously hurt my pace. It’s odd as the car felt good on the hard compounds in FP3 today but I just couldn’t get the mediums to work so we’ll have to look at that again tonight. However, with the car performing well on the primes and the pace we have on the inters I think tomorrow could be interesting. It’s rained every day at about the same time as it’ll be halfway through the race tomorrow so strategy’s going to be really important. Physically I feel really good, totally prepared for the race, so we’ll look at the plans for the race and hopefully pick up where we left off in FP3.”
