Formula One news

Honda misses out on top ten

Following a frustrating qualifying session at Istanbul Park, the Honda team will start tomorrow's Turkish Grand Prix from the sixth and seventh rows of the grid. Rubens Barrichello will line up in 12th place and Jenson Button 13th, after the pair set lap times less than 0.1s apart. 

"It was a good effort from everyone today however unfortunately we are not as fast as we thought we might be here in Turkey," said Barrichello. "It is a balance problem, rather than the tyres or grip levels, and I believe we achieved the best that we could today. I could not get the car to perform well over the whole lap. The first and second sector were good, but the third sector was not working for us. Realistically this is where the car is at the moment. We need another step to make us a regular qualifier into Q3."

Button commented, "I have to be reasonably pleased with 13th as we were struggling to get the tyres working in qualifying today. Q1 was not too bad and we completed both runs on the prime tyre. We switched to the option for my first run in Q2 as everyone seemed to be going quicker on that tyre but for some reason the option didn't work for me and I had no grip. So we went back to the prime which should be about three-tenths slower around here so 13th is not too bad. It's annoying that we can't get the option to work but our prime tyre pace is very good, particularly over longer runs." 

Honda chief engineer Steve Clark added, "The issues we had were with the tyres and trying to get grip from the prime or a balance on the option tyre. We saw this morning that the two tyres behaved differently and the two drivers split their strategy in Q1 because of this. In the second session neither car had the pace to get into the top ten. We had no problems aside from being able to get the most out of the tyres, so obviously this is a disappointment as we felt that we had made a little more progress here."

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