After their dominant pace in the final section of Qualifying, Toyota have now turned their attention to scoring the team’s first victory in Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.
However nothing is assured, as both Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock have suffered a number of technical glitches over the weekend. Trulli had to contend with a braking issue, during Qualifying. An issue that he hopes can be resolved before tomorrow’s Race.
Jarno Trulli – 1st: “I’m thrilled to be back on pole again. This weekend has gone well and it’s great to be starting at the front tomorrow. In fact this afternoon didn’t go quite as smoothly as yesterday because I had a bit of a problem with my brakes during the session. That’s a bit of a worry for the race so we’ll have to look into it overnight. Still, I’m confident for tomorrow because our race pace has been good this weekend and we’ve been looking after the tyres well.
“The first three races haven’t really worked out for me but I hope we can now change that. We tested here over the winter and this track has gone well for our cars in the past. To have both cars in the top two shows we did a very good job. I’d like to dedicate this pole both to my team, who have worked so hard, and to the people of my home region Abruzzo, who suffered a disastrous earthquake this month.”
Timo Glock – 2nd: “It’s brilliant that we’ve been able to take the top two places today. We had a problem on my car yesterday and we were struggling but the team did a good job to change things for today. We were quickest in the session this morning, though I lost a bit of running with an electronics glitch.
“But qualifying went extremely smoothly. The wind changed a bit and it was a struggle to get used to the prime tyres in Q1. After that I felt more comfortable in Q2 but in Q3 I made a small error after turn 8 so I couldn’t catch Jarno. A big thank you to all the engineers and mechanics because it’s been a hard start to the season for everyone and this is a great result for us.”
Pascal Vasselon – Senior General Manager Chassis: “We’re obviously delighted with today’s result. We have been competitive throughout the weekend so we were targeting pole and things went as expected – though the gap to the cars behind us is a bit bigger than we anticipated. Both drivers did a great job and from the very first lap in Q1 we could see the pace was there so we just had to manage it over the sessions.
“Tomorrow’s race will be very interesting because the tyre situation generates huge differences between the two specs and it opens windows for very different strategies. We already saw yesterday that our pace over one lap and our consistency over long runs has been good. This morning went well except for a small electronics problem on Timo’s car. Congratulations to the engineers and mechanics who fixed it in time. Now we have to convert this perfect start into a result tomorrow.”
