Mark Webber admitted to being shocked at Red Bull’s lack of pace after qualifying at the lower end of the top-ten.
The Milton Keynes squad had been tipped as early-favourites but have struggled throughout this weekend with reliability issues. Sebastian Vettel overcame a lack of running to qualify in eighth place, one better than Webber in ninth.
Webber’s qualfiying went from bad to worse as the Belgian Grand Prix stewards later gave the Australian a reprimand for impeding a rival car in the first segment of qualifying.
However the Australian escaped any further punishment and will not be given a grid penalty for tomorrow’s race.
Sebastian Vettel – 8th: “It was quite an interesting session – and not the best for us obviously; eighth and ninth will be tough tomorrow on the grid. Unfortunately I made a mistake on my last flying lap in Q3. I lost the rear going into Turn 14, which leads on to the back straight and lost all the speed, so there was no point in completing the lap. The results were quite a surprise today; I don’t think anyone expected Fisi (Fisichella) to be on pole.”
Mark Webber – 9th: “That was a strange session we expected to be more competitive than that. Fisi (Fisichella) on pole! A great day for them, but we were surprised by that. A lot of the guys were too quick for us; it shows you just never know in this game. It should be an interesting race tomorrow. We had to change the engine before qualifying, but that wouldn’t affect our result and we were pretty confident going into the session. We put in a new engine as we had to make some checks on the one that we used this morning, but it looks like it is okay.”
Christian Horner, Team Principal: “A different Q3 to normal I bet none of the bookies predicted that one! Our guys had a strong Q2 and the fuel effect is reasonably large around here, so we’ll wait with interest to see what the fuel figures are later today. Congratulations to Force India for their first pole position. We’ look forward to what should be a really exciting race tomorrow.”
Fabrice Lom, Renault, Principal Engineer Track Support: “Again a bad day. We apologise to Mark for the electrical problem that we had on his engine it really seems as though we have a black cloud hanging over our heads at the moment. I can only assure Red Bull and the people that want to beat us that we will never give up and when this black cloud lifts, we will fight like hell!”
