Mark Webber: “For sure I won’t be starting on pole…”

Mark Webber is bullish about Red Bull’s prospects in Bahrain after finishing FP2 in second place, behind Kimi Raikkonen.

However he didn’t do as many laps as he wanted to during the afternoon, and was thus missing a little long run knowledge.

“We didn’t get to do enough laps unfortunately in P2,” said Webber. “I will have to rely on Sebastian’s data, and see how it went for him. Overall when I was on track I was not too bad at all, I’m pretty happy with the car. But never, ever rest on our laurels, there’s still areas to improve, and we need to say how we’re progressing on both cars as well in terms of developments, and pick out what we need for tomorrow.

“I think the car looks really competitive, but again we see Kimi arrive for one lap every now and again and he’s still very, very fast. Kimi is strong, Ferrari are strong, Mercedes is still there as well. It’s very, very tight, the first three or four rows are very, very tight on time, and the Force Indias are in there as well.”

Webber does of course go into qualifying with the three-place penalty he picked up in China.

“Let’s see how qualifying goes, and then after that obviously the race is more important. Especially for me with the penalty, for sure I won’t be starting on pole! But I need to clear people in the race somehow.”