Austrian GP McLaren Saturday notes

The West McLaren Mercedes team will start Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix from seventh and eighth positions after David Coulthard set a time of 1:10.331 and Mika Hakkinen 1:10.342. This came as a disappointment as David and Mika had been consistently quicker during this morning's two free practice sessions.

David Coulthard:
'Obviously we didn't manage to get the car to perform as well as this morning. The balance had changed and we were affected by oversteer, and in the time we had available, we were unable to rectify the situation. I had to abort a couple of runs because of traffic and eventually you just don't have any more time. We will take today's performance on the chin and look at how and where we can improve for tomorrow. We have already demonstrated that the pace is there.'

Mika Hakkinen:
'I'm really disappointed with the outcome of qualifying. For the conditions in qualifying we weren't able to further improve on the balance we had this morning. On my last run, I experienced an engine problem, but in the race anything can happen as we have seen in previous years, so now we have to focus on getting everything right for tomorrow.'

Ron Dennis:
'Sometimes you get it right and most times we do -- this was one of the rare cases where we got it wrong. We had no fundamental problem other than going in the wrong direction with the set up. Of course it's a little harder to fight from where we are on the grid but I'm confident that our engineers can rediscover our competitiveness for tomorrow.'

Norbert Haug:
'The team and the drivers couldn't find the right set up. That we are fast, we demonstrated yesterday and in this morning's practice. Mika's engine problem was found to be caused by a small loss of water pressure, which according to our investigations, did not influence the engine's performance. Now we have to concentrate on finding the right race set up to make amends tomorrow.'