Hispania Racing was pleased to make qualifying, despite both Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna having limited track time with the new Dallara-built car.
Although Senna competed in all three practice sessions, Chandhok had to wait until qualifying to get his first taste of Formula One action.
Ultimately the team’s target is to try and gain as much knowledge of the new car during tomrrow’s race.
Bruno Senna (23rd): It was certainly a relief to continue to add laps to this car when others have already completed thousands of miles in testing, we only have 26 laps on the board. We have already learned a lot and will continue to do so with every lap we complete. I want to congratulate again my mechanics, engineers and the whole team for their incredible hard work to ensure we are in a position to be racing tomorrow.
Karun Chandhok (24th): I still can’t believe that we will be on the grid tomorrow. It was not looking good in the morning and I was not sure if we would make it to the qualifying session as well. I didn’t expect to be driving the car for the first time in qualifying but as I have always said these are the circumstances and we made the best of it. For me it was just a string of installation laps and to finish just a second slower than Bruno is definitely a huge achievement. I think I might be the only driver in the history of F1 to go straight into a qualifying session of a race without even having done a shakedown of the car! Once again I think the team has done a brilliant job so am very grateful to them.
Colin Kolles: Our mechanics and engineers worked miracles and were awake for 38 hours preparing for our first outing. Having never run the car before this weekend we have had the usual new car technical challenges which we would normally have solved during pre-season testing. But we are determined to work through this usual process as quickly as possible, even though it may well be in the public eye. In a way, we are treating this race as a test session and this is a great success for the entire team to even be here with both cars running. On Monday we will go home with lots of important data and valuable information which we will be using for big steps forwards as the season moves on and hope to make consistent improvements. The focus today for the team was to run both cars on track. We are focused on safety, reliability and then performance will come. I would like to thank everyone for their dedication we have taken an historic first step.
