Glock slips behind Lotuses

Timo Glock started in front of the two Lotuses but ended the race trailing the green cars once again.

Timo Glock

Once again Virgin weren’t able to find better pace when they switched to the softer tyre. Glock said after second practice:

The Prime tyre was working well but we didn’t do so well on the Options. After trying the Option tyre we made some set-up changes and I’m confident that we have a good direction for tomorrow.
Timo Glock

Qualified best of the new teams’ cars but felt he could have gone even quicker:

I had a very good first run which was already enough to stay in front of the Lotus cars. I had a little bit of a problem with the second set of tyres and I had to switch to the third set, which cost us a lot of time and I was only able to do one timed lap. There was more to come but the tyres were not up to temperature
Timo Glock

Penalties for Adrian Sutil and Sebastien Buemi promoted him to 17th on the grid, his best starting position since Malaysia.

Heikki Kovalainen got past him at the start as he had to avoid Vitaly Petrov’s Renault at turn two.

He pitted on lap 16 to get on the medium tyres but Jarno Trulli was able to get ahead of him by staying out longer.

Compare Timo Glock’s form against his team mate in 2010

Lucas di Grassi

Felt he missed the best of the conditions in Q1:

We were not on the track when it was at its best. Because of that I am not very happy with the qualifying result as for sure there was more to come.

He was running a long first stint when a worsening rear suspension problem forced him to pit. He returned to the track and was still running at the end but completed too few laps to be classified:

We had a mechanical problem since early in the race, which was getting worse and worse. We had to stop and investigate it because it was getting more and more difficult to drive the car.

We realised though that the problem could be fixed and that is what we did, but by then my race was over and all I could do was get the car to the finish.
Lucas di Grassi

Compare Lucas di Grassi’s form against his team mate in 2010

Jerome d’Ambrosio

Made his third appearance for the team in first practice, taking Lucas di Grassi’s place as usual. He will not be in the car in Abu Dhabi.

2010 Brazilian Grand Prix

Image © Virgin Racing