European GP Arrows qualifying notes

Nurburgring (Germany)

The OrangeArrows team's hopes for a good qualifying result at the Nürburgring today were dashed when Enrique Bernoldi and Jos Verstappen finished the session in 18th and 19th positions respectively. On a day when it was announced that Verstappen would be staying with the team for another season it was unfortunate that the good news didn't continue through into the qualifying results.

Both driver's first runs produced an interesting result. Heading onto the track one after the other, Verstappen put in a time of 1:18.369 but just seconds later Bernoldi crossed the line to clock up exactly the same lap time.

Enrique Bernoldi
"Well the qualifying session was okay for me, but only okay. I'm a little disappointed as this morning we were looking a lot more promising but as soon as the temperatures went up we lost a lot of grip and performance. We expected to be higher up than this."

Jos Verstappen
"I'm very disappointed. We lost a lot of track time yesterday but thought we had made good progress this morning. This wasn't the case as we are actually slower than this morning as we just couldn't find the grip. As well as that we were slower on the straights compared to this morning. We have a lot of work to do."

Mike Coughlan, Technical Director, OrangeArrows
"That really was a disaster for us. We expected to be in 13th or 14th position so we need to have a very good look at our data to see why that didn't happen. For now though we will concentrate on our plans for the race and hope for a better day tomorrow."

- Arrows