More qualifying frustration for Rosberg

For the second Saturday in a row Nico Rosberg has compromised his grid position with a scrappy lap in qualifying.

Despite showing impressive speed at times over the weekend, the Mercedes driver will start only seventh in Malaysia – and that after gaining a place from Kimi Raikkonen’s penalty.

Rosberg insisted that there was no particular reason why he had suffered a similar fate in two races.

“No it’s just a coincidence,” he said. “It just wasn’t a great lap today, unfortunately.”

His session was not helped by losing a set of tyres to a yellow flag: “There was Maldonado who went off right in front of me, so there were yellows everywhere. I decided the best thing was going to be to lift off enough, and so that cost me a set.”

Despite his personal frustrations, Rosberg is upbeat about the team’s potential.

“We’re definitely getting better, for sure, but in the race we’re still had some difficulties in Melbourne, so at the moment we really need to focus on that, and focus on moving forward and doing a better job there. Here of course tomorrow is going to be very interesting, because it’s going to be quite tough again on the rear tyres. I have a feeling that we can do better. If it’s enough, I really don’t know yet, but I think we can do definitely a lot better than Melbourne.”

The team has spent a lot of effort on solving the tyre overheating problems that affected him last weekend.

“It’s not an easy thing to help, we’ve done a lot of work for it, we’ve done a lot of changes to improve that situation, so I’m confident that we can do better, but as I say, we don’t know if it’s enough yet, so we need to see tomorrow if everything that we’ve done really has been a big enough step or not.”

The infamous Mercedes F-Duct only works when the DRS is employed, so it could be of great benefit when Rosberg and Michael Schumacher are battling in traffic.

Asked bythis blog whether he was looking forward to seeing how effective it will be in race trim, Nico said: “I look forward to overtaking, definitely tomorrow! I think definitely we have a good speed advantage and I have a good speed advantage over the people in front, for sure. So that should definitely help with overtaking and moving forward a little bit through the field.”