Robert Kubica was satisfied with his qualifying performance for tomorrow’s Turkish Grand Prix, as both Renault drivers managed to qualify in the top ten for the first time this season.
The Polish driver was relatively pleased to qualify seventh on the grid, but expressed his concern with the softer tyres which prevented him from finding more time in the car. Despite this, Kubica believes that the R30’s race pace is strong and that a points scoring finish may well be on the agenda.
Meanwhile, team-mate Vitaly Petrov was ecstatic with his qualifying effort – as the Russian broke into Q3 for the first time in his F1 career. The 25-year-old will start ninth in tomorrow’s race and is hoping to also fight for points.
Robert Kubica – 7th:I’m pretty happy with my qualifying session because seventh position is about what we were expecting after free practice. The only issue I had was with the soft tyres because I didn’t feel totally comfortable on them today and so I couldn’t find those final few tenths that I needed to be higher up the grid. However, my lap in Q3 was good and we can’t be too disappointed with this result. It’s also nice to see Vitaly up there with me in ninth and I think we will have strong race pace tomorrow, which means we should be able to score some good points.
Vitaly Petrov- 9th: It feels really good to have made it into Q3 and to be starting the race from ninth. So far it has been a really smooth weekend for me with no problems and my engineers and mechanics have done an excellent job to give me a car that I feel really happy with. The car is easy to drive and we have managed to improve the performance with each session, so I knew that we had a good chance to be in top ten today. It’s going to be a long race tomorrow, but I’m looking forward to a close fight with the cars around me and hopefully scoring some more points for the team.
Eric Boullier, Team Principal:To see both cars make it through to the top ten is an excellent result for the team and puts us in a good position for the race tomorrow. Both cars have run perfectly all weekend and the developments we have brought to this race have continued to add good performance to the car. Robert’s seventh place continues his strong run of qualifying performances and it’s great to see Vitaly join him in Q3 for the first time. He has been close to Robert’s pace all weekend and has not put a foot wrong in any of the sessions. We know that the car has good race pace here so we are hopeful of seeing both cars bring home points tomorrow.
Alan Permane, Chief Race Engineer:Overall it has been an excellent day: the drivers are happy with their cars and both free practice and qualifying have been trouble-free sessions for us. One of the big decisions today was to determine which would be the best tyre for qualifying because it was very close between the soft and the hard compound. In the end the soft was slightly quicker and so that’s the one we concentrated on for Q3. Robert put in a good lap to qualify seventh and it’s great to see Vitaly reach Q3 for the first time and qualify in ninth place. For the race tomorrow we are targeting good points finishes with both cars.
