Formula One news

Rosberg confirms Williams pace in qualifying

The Williams team showed a steady start to their 2008 campaign, qualifying the two FW30s in P7 and P14 respectively. Both drivers graduated to the second qualifying session comfortably, but a red flag in the second session required a revised running strategy which cost Nakajima track time and Rosberg a valuable set of new option tyres. Nevertheless, both drivers will start tomorrow's race confident that they can show well, with Nico Rosberg looking to lead the charge for all-important early season points. 

"I am pretty happy with today's qualifying as we very nearly got the best out of it," said Rosberg. "I felt that coming here would be fantastic as I hoped we could be the best of the midfield and so we measured up against this expectation. We had a difficult start to the weekend yesterday and we didn't show what we are capable of, and we still have a little bit to come. So, overall, I am happy and we have a really good position for tomorrow to try and score some points. It's going to be a tough race though for all the cars and I am sure there will be a few problems up and down the field, but I am confident we'll do okay."

Kazuki Nakajima commented, "It was not the best result from qualifying, but at least I took one more step forward from my debut race last year by making it through to Q2. It was more difficult this time round because of the red flag, but it was important for me to take it steady today and trying to find the extra lap time to make it into Q3 would have been quite tough. I'm looking forward to tomorrow."

Williams technical director Sam Michael added, "It was a good qualifying session from Nico. The red flag in Q2 meant that he had to use an extra set of option tyres which unfortunately didn't leave him a set of the better qualifying tyre for Q3, so his performance was not bad. He should have a strong race tomorrow. Kazuki was also caught out in Q2 and did not make it through to the final session, so we will have to look at strategy overnight to move him up."

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