Webber's crew worked through the lunch break after P3 dramas
Mark Webber insists that he could have got through to Q2 on the hard tyres, had he been able to get in two timed laps at the end of the session, as the team had planned.
In the end he only got one lap because the car didn’t quite make it out of the garage in time.
Webber’s day was already compromised by an electronic problem that cost him most of P3 and the fact that he had no KERS, which is worth around 0.5s a lap.
“One lap in P3, that doesn’t help,” said Webber. “We were a little bit on the back foot. Obviously the guys did a phenomenal job, we just got the car together minuts before qualifying. We went out and my first run was probably half a second shy of where we needed to be, with obviously KERS as well added on top of that.
“We were on the bubble and decided to go for another run on the prime to have a few laps on it, but we never got out quick enough, so we only had one timed lap, and added to that the tyres weren’t up to temp. So that second set was a bit more difficult to get the job done.
“I was pretty cool with it, but obviously we all started to panic a bit at the end when we knew we weren’t going to get in two laps. The tyre should have been enough, but on one lap it wasn’t enough. That’s where we got squeezed. We snookered ourselves really.
“We had electrical problems in P3, and always we had some upshift problems in P3, so we’ve had a pretty solid day in terms of the car putting up a bit of a fight. But the guys have worked like hell, they’ve done what they can, and that’s the way it goes sometimes.
“At this level you need everything perfect, we know, to be successful. We’ve had it in the past, and we’ll work hard again to get it in the future. We had a tough GP in Malaysia, and we had a tough Saturday here. We just need to try and put some Saturdays and Sundays together. There’s flashes there for sure, that we can do it, put it’s just pulling it all together at the right time.”
Although Webber said it was a team decision, clearly sitting in the car a driver has less idea than the team about the potential cut-off point. Asked by this blog whether he agreed, he said: “When any top team goes out in Q1 we can all put the hindsight goggles on go yeah, we should have done this. In the end for sure options would have made life easier, that’s completely obvious. We could have made that decision, but we didn’t, as a team.
“We all thought we were going to get enough laps in on the prime to get the two timed in, but we were a bit late going out, and they were the wrong tyre as well. The timing was the problem, not the tyre.”
Adam Cooper F1 