Despite being at the bottom of the leaderboard, the HRT F1 Team successfully completed its first laps in qualifying at the Bahrain Grand Prix with six laps for Bruno Senna and seven for Karun Chandhok.

In the morning during the third first practice session, Bruno Senna had clocked an additional 11 laps to yesterdays 20 as the newest team on the grid covered its first ever miles with its debut car, compared to its rival teams who had covered over 4,000km of testing in February.

“It was certainly a relief to continue to add laps to this car when others have already completed thousands of miles in testing, we only have 26 laps on board,“ Senna said. “We have already learned a lot and will continue to do so with every lap we complete. I want to congratulate again my mechanics, engineers and the whole team for their incredible hard work to ensure we are in a position to be racing tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Karun Chandhoks car suffered an additional hydraulic system failure and the team chose not to send him out in practice, instead focusing on making sure everything was in order for qualifying, when he successfully covered his first seven laps.

“I still cant believe that we will be on the grid tomorrow,” the Indian racer said. “It was not looking good in the morning and I was not sure if we would make it to the qualifying session as well. I didn’t expect to be driving the car for the first time in qualifying but as I have always said these are the circumstances and we made the best of it.”

“For me it was just a string of installation laps and to finish just a second slower than Bruno is definitely a huge achievement. I think I might be the only driver in the history of F1 to go straight into a qualifying session of a race without even having done a shakedown of the car! Once again I think the team has done a brilliant job so am very grateful to them.”

Having never run the car before this weekend, HRT F1 team was pleased to achieve its goal of covering mileage with both cars. The team will again be in action tomorrow for the race and start from the back of the grid as it bids to cover as many miles as possible.