German GP: Honda Saturday qualifying notes

HONDA DRIVER SECURES SEVENTH ROW SLOT
Villeneuve and Button qualify 13th and 17th for German Grand Prix

Lucky Strike B*A*R Honda's Jacques Villeneuve qualified in 13th place for tomorrow's grid of the German Grand Prix to start the race from the seventh row while team-mate Jenson Button will start from 17th place.

The glorious weather continued at Hockenheim for this afternoon's final qualifying, the air and track temperatures registering 32 and 44 degrees as the session got underway.

Villeneuve went out second to complete his one flying lap, having failed to set a time in first qualifying yesterday. The Canadian completed a tidy lap although lost a bit of time in the last sector, recording a time of 1m17.090s, finally qualifying in 13th position for tomorrow's race.

Approximately 20 minutes in to the session, Button took to the track for his flying lap, going out ninth in the running order. The Briton ran extremely wide on the final corner and lost a lot of time, recording a lap of 1m18.085s and qualifying in 17th place.

Juan Pablo Montoya snatched pole position from Williams team-mate Ralf Schumacher followed by Rubens Barrichello (Ferrari) and Jarno Trulli (Renault) on the second row. McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen and Ferrari's Michael Schumacher will start from fifth and sixth position on the grid.

Shuhei Nakamoto - Engineering Director, Honda Racing Development:

"Clearly both drivers were pushing really hard today. As Jenson proved at Silverstone, we can challenge for points from any qualifying position, so I'm looking forward to scoring more points in tomorrow's race."

Jacques Villeneuve Position: 13th

"The car is lively and the balance is not bad so I could push hard today. The hardest thing was to get temperature into the tyres for one lap because they take around five or six laps to really start working. I lost some time in the last two corners when I picked up a bit of understeer and the tyres grained a little. We had the choice of a tyre that was better on one lap for qualifying but which we couldn't race well, or a tyre that would get better with the race. We chose the latter and I think we'll see the benefit of that tomorrow."

Jenson ButtonPosition: 17th

"It was a pretty terrible qualifying and very disappointing because the car is strong here. I had too much oversteer throughout the lap and the car was just skating around at the back. Then in the second to last corner I made a big mistake when I got a lot of oversteer and ended up running off the circuit. It's strange because we haven't made any changes from warm-up, when the car was quick and we still had more to come. I think that the track temperature increasing by six degrees probably had a big influence as that can really unsettle the handling. We should have been inside the top 10 today so this has compromised us for sure, but I'm confident that we'll be better in the race. I had a good race at Silverstone against all the odds so I'll have to pull another one out of the bag here tomorrow now."

-honda-