BELGIAN GRAND PRIX - QUALIFYING
SATURDAY 15th SEPTEMBER 2007
Nico Rosberg qualified his Williams-Toyota in sixth and will
start tomorrow’s Belgian Grand Prix from fifth place*
following a strong performance and an intelligent use of tactics
in a very competitive qualifying session at the Spa-Francorchamps
circuit today. His qualifying performance was a step improvement
after a difficult day of preparation in practice yesterday,
with the team improving set-up and Nico executing an effective
strategy to qualify strongly. Team-mate Alex Wurz will start
from P16 with the benefit of a free fuel strategy having not
progressed into Q3.
Nico Rosberg:
Today’s qualifying was super, it really went well and
I am very happy. I am a bit surprised as well, to be honest,
because I didn’t think we’d be so far up as it
was very tight to make it into the top ten in Q2. We struggled
here a bit more yesterday than we did on other tracks but
overnight the team did a good job and found all the right
solutions. Fifth position on the grid is really fantastic.
This puts us in a strong position to be able to score some
good points tomorrow.
Alex Wurz:
Some of my problem today was with not enough top speed on
the straights. Of course this is quite punishing at a track
like Spa. The engineers will have a look at it. Otherwise
we have done a very good job and made real progress from yesterday
with the set-up and the car felt good under cornering. We
should have a good car for tomorrow even if the start position
is not great.
Sam Michael, Technical Director:
Great job by Nico today. He made some good judgements in
qualifying to put his car in the right place in terms of towing
and saving his softer tyres on out laps. We are looking forward
to seeing him and Alex race strongly tomorrow. The engineers
worked hard all night to improve the car from yesterday and
it was nice to see such a decent step. We’ll also check
everything on Alex’s car before the race to see why
there is such a big difference to his team mate. We didn't
have any reliability issues today. *5th placed Robert Kubica
will be penalised 10 grid places for an unscheduled engine
change
SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, BELGIUM
7.004KMS / 4.352 MILES
SCATTERED CLOUD
AIR 17-180C, TRACK 26 - 310C
POS DRIVER TEAM Q1 Q2 Q3
1 K RAIKKONEN FERRARI - - 1:45.994
2 F MASSA FERRARI - - 1:46.011
3 F ALONSO MCLAREN - - 1:46.091
6* N Rosberg
FW29-05 H186
AT&T WILLIAMS 1:46.950 (7th) 1:46.469 (9th) 1:47.334
16 A Wurz
FW29-03 H177
AT&T WILLIAMS 1:47.522 (15th) 1:47.394 -
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