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In today's qualifying session at the Hockenheim circuit in Germany, the Mercedes Grand Prix team drivers, Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher, qualified in ninth and 11th positions respectively ahead of Sunday's German Grand Prix.
Just 0.06s separated the pair at the end of Q2 with Nico progressing to the final session and Michael just missing out in 11th position after the Williams of Nico Hulkenberg made one final run and secured ninth place, pushing Schumacher out of the top ten.
"There isn't much more to say about qualifying other than the result was what was achievable for us today. Clearly it was disappointing because we had expected to be able to fight for fifth or sixth place but from the difference between our two cars, you can see our results are what the potential was,” he said.
“If I want to find something positive, it is that at least I will be starting from the better side of the grid and in the end, I prefer 11th to 10th place because of that. I had some issues with my brakes during qualifying but I do not rate that a real factor for the performance today. We are a bit stronger in race pace than in qualifying but we clearly wanted to achieve more for our fans. Let's hope that tomorrow the race will develop in a way that we can still show them something."
Meanwhile, teammate Nico Rosberg went on to compete in Q3 with his quickest lap good enough for ninth place on the grid for tomorrow afternoon’s eleventh round of the season....
"I was hoping for a strong weekend here in Hockenheim in front of our fans but unfortunately I struggled a lot in qualifying today,” he explained. “It's really disappointing and it seems that we are just not making our developments work as well as we hoped this weekend which we need to look into.”
“I hope that we find the problem with the car otherwise it is difficult to explain why we are not closer to the front. I had a lot of oversteer and that made it really difficult as I had to keep coming down on the front wing levels which did not help. I will do my best tomorrow to achieve a good result but it will be difficult from this position."
"We obviously had a disappointing qualifying today at one of our home races, particularly considering the promise that we showed over the practice sessions,” added Ross Brawn. “With the changeable weather conditions over the weekend and a new aero package on the car, clearly we haven't understood how to get the best from it here.”
“That's eventually shown in qualifying today and the drivers were not able to extract any more performance from the car than their respective positions. We will look at all of the data available and understand what is happening to ensure that we make better use of the package in the future." |
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