Malaysian GP: Super Aguri Saturday qualifying notes

Super Aguri F1 Team drivers Takuma Sato and Yuji Ide will be starting the 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix amongst the big guns in the sport. Honda engine reliability has ensured that both Taku and Yuji, although qualifying at the bottom of the table today, will be splitting some of the racing pairs from the Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, Toyota and Honda Racing F1 teams when they arrive on the grid for the start of the race tomorrow.

Takuma Sato:

"I believe that we did the best job we could today and I think that we achieved the car's best performance. Unfortunately we are still struggling in the mid-sector due to understeer, but we are running reliably and will have both cars on the starting grid tomorrow which is great."

"This is a high down-force circuit so we knew that we would have a hard race in Sepang, but we shall do our best tomorrow and hopefully be able to bring our two cars home."

Yuji Ide:

"For qualifying the car ran better than it did this morning, but the balance is still not good enough. I went off the track during practice because I tried to push too much but during qualifying the handling of the car felt much better."

"It is hot but everybody is running in the same condition so it is not such a problem. I will talk to the engineers and see what we can do to improve the car's pace and I hope that I will be able to do better tomorrow and get to the checkered flag. I am really looking forward to my second race here in Sepang."

Aguri Suzuki, Team Principal:

"There hasn't been a big problem with the car so far, so I am relatively happy. We tried different set-ups this morning for qualifying and the race and we have a number of directions to decide upon tonight."

"We still have a lot of small issues to solve however we are learning so much more about the car by fixing those issues. Our qualifying time is similar to that in Bahrain, but we have more data from the car, so I hope that we will do little better than the last race."

"Takuma has familiarised himself with the characteristics of the car and is handling it well. Yuji was running our new front wing this afternoon was trying to get the feel for it. He of course still has a lot to learn, but he is doing well and the team has been doing a great job."

TAKUMA SATO
Chassis: SA05-02
Grid Position 16 (tbc)
Lap Time 1:39.011

YUJI IDE
Chassis: SA05-01
Grid Position 17 (tbc)
Lap Time 1:40.720

-superaguri-