Nico Rosberg was satisfied with his seventh position in qualifying for tomorrow’s European Grand Prix.
The Williams driver, could not match the pace of the likes of Mclaren or Brawn, but explained after the session that he did not want to compromise his race performance in qualifying – admitting that he is carrying a significant amount of fuel.
However qualifying did not go as planned for Kazuki Nakajima. The Japanese driver will start in seventeenth place for tomorrow’s Grand Prix after suffering from engine problems.
Nico Rosberg – 7th: “Qualifying was generally ok. I’m in P7 with quite a lot of fuel, possibly more than anybody else around me, so I have a strong strategy for the race. There was no point in trying to out qualify the cars with KERS because they will overtake me off the line anyway. I’d prefer to qualify behind them, have more fuel on board and then beat them in the race. This track suits our car so we could have a pointsscoring race tomorrow.”
Kazuki Nakajima – 17th: “We had a failure on my car which caused the engine to cut out during Q1 so I didn’t have a chance to show what we could do. It’s a shame because I think we were strong enough to have been in the top ten today. We have a good race pace, so I just need to use that to my advantage and do my best tomorrow.”
Rod Nelson, Chief Operations Engineer: “Today was obviously disappointing for Kazuki. We are still looking into the problem which stopped him out on the circuit, but we do know it wasn’t driver error. We are reasonably pleased with where we are with Nico. He’s on the clean side of the grid, which is a large advantage here. He’ll have KERS cars on the dirty side next to him, but hopefully we’ll stay ahead of them this time. We’re happy with the strategy we’ve chosen.”
