Michael Schumacher was disappointed with his qualifying performance in Canada – after finding himself eliminated in the second segment of qualifying.
The seven-times champion will start tomorrow’s race from thirteenth and admitted that he struggled to master the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve due to a poor set-up. Despite this, the 41-year-old is confident that his Mercedes team will be able to come up with a strong strategy for tomorrow’s race.
Although team-mate Nico Rosberg managed to get into the final segment of qualifying he had to settle for tenth on the grid – admitting that he got the maximum out of his car.
Nico Rosberg, 10th:“That wasn’t a great qualifying session for us today. We have a good car here this weekend but unfortunately we couldn’t get the tyres to work properly this afternoon. That was the big issue for us today. The harder tyre wasn’t too bad in Q1 but we struggled with the option later on and there was just no more lap time to be had. It is very disappointing to be starting in tenth place but anything can happen in the race so we can only look forward and take advantage where possible tomorrow.”
Michael Schumacher, 13th: “I am obviously disappointed after today’s qualifying. We simply did not have the balance or grip and overall we had a lot of problems with braking and handling. The car was just not performing as we expected. We had similar issues yesterday afternoon and we made some changes after second practice. This morning, the changes seemed to have made sense as our position was reasonable but this afternoon, I was facing similar issues again. It’s difficult to understand the reasons at the moment but we will look deeply into it now and find a good strategy for the race tomorrow.”
Ross Brawn, Mercedes GP team principal
“A very disappointing qualifying session for us today, particularly as I was quite encouraged by our performance yesterday and this morning. However when it came to qualifying, we just weren’t able to put our laps together. We tried both the prime and option tyres but finding the performance seemed to get away from us. There was very little difference between the tyres and ultimately we struggled to get the best out of them.”
Norbert Haug, vice-president, Mercedes-Benz Motorsport
“Not the best possible result for us today. We certainly didn’t extract the maximum out of our cars and didn’t use the tyres in the best possible way. But tomorrow we will possibly be in a better position.”
