Vitaly Petrov was feeling slightly frustrated after qualifying 14th on the grid for tomorrow's British Grand Prix, admitting that his Renault team had much bigger ambitions heading into the weekend. The Russian driver says changeable weather conditions prevented the Enstone-based squad from exploiting their true potential, with team-mate Nick Heidfeld also struggling for pace in 16th.
"I am disappointed, as we all came here with much higher expectations," Petrov explained after recording his worst qualifying result of the season so far. "The rain has disturbed things this weekend, there’s no doubt about that. Today again, the weather has made it very difficult.
As a result, we could not unlock our potential and secure the flying lap that we would have needed. Having said that, the car feels very strong and fast in the high speed corners so I still remain optimistic that we can gain quite a few places in the race tomorrow.
"I hope our strategy is effective, because the DRS sector is not very long and overtaking opportunities here are limited. We will need to be very much on our game to take our performance up, but we are up to the challenge."
"At this stage, it’s still difficult to see how much effect the changes made to the mapping rules had on our performance this weekend," added 34-year-old team-mate Heidfeld. "It had an impact, of course, but our feeling is that today’s situation is the result of several factors. The rain did make our preparations difficult, also.
"The car is not bad to drive and it does not seem slow, we’ve just not been in a position to fully exploit it. We struggled with the rear wing yesterday and then this morning, changed it for qualifying that hopefully worked better but obviously disappointed to only be in P16."
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| Pos. | Driver | Team | Time | Laps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  M. Webber | Red Bull | 01:30.399 | 19 |
| 2. | S. Vettel | Red Bull | 01:30.431 | 19 |
| 3. | F. Alonso | Ferrari | 01:30.516 | 20 |
| 4. | F. Massa | Ferrari | 01:31.124 | 16 |
| 5. | J. Button | McLaren | 01:31.898 | 21 |
| 6. | P. di Resta | Force India | 01:31.929 | 14 |
| 7. | P. Maldonado | Williams | 01:31.933 | 16 |
| 8. | K. Kobayashi | Sauber | 01:32.128 | 16 |
| 9. | N. Rosberg | Mercedes | 01:32.209 | 18 |
| 10. | L. Hamilton | McLaren | 01:32.376 | 20 |
| Full results | ||||
| Nick Heidfeld | |||
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| More Nick Heidfeld photos | |||
| Vitaly Petrov | |||
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| More Vitaly Petrov photos | |||
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