Webber admits to errors on final lap
Date published : 13 Mar 2010 - 14:17:41
Mark Webber admitted he only had himself to blame for the five-car gap between himself and pole-sitting team-mate Sebastian Vettel after making two errors on his final qualifying lap in Bahrain.
The Australian had appeared close on pace to his young stable-mate throughout practice and set the fourth and third fastest times in Q1 and Q2 respectively, but found himself only sixth on the grid after lapping almost 1.2s slower than Vettel on his last run.
He revealed he lost an initial amount of time when he locked up his tyre tyres going into the tight right-handed turn 16, before making another error later round the lap as he tried to make up the time.
Sector two I stuffed up turn 16, he told reporters.
I had a big rear lock up into there, which was a bit of a surprise.
I lost about two and a half tenths in there and I was trying to get it back in [turn] 19 and managed to lose myself another four tenths.
So, yeah, [it was a] very frustrating middle sector for me hence I dropped a few rows unfortunately with that.
But while a cleaner lap would have at least put him onto the second row, Webber was not too downhearted about his position on the grid given the undoubted pace of the RB6 and is now looking forward to seeing what he can do in Sunday's race.
Yes, [I'm] back a bit, [but] long, long afternoon tomorrow looking forward to seeing how it's going to go, he said.
It's a great start for us obviously to have a car showing this quality of performance early on.
Also on a track you could argue would be a pretty testing circuit for us in terms of layout. So that's another feather in our gap for today, only.
Tomorrow is a whole new ball game and we are in a good position of course Sebastian is in a great position, but I'm not in too bad a position and we can move forwards from there.
Although the team suffered several mechanical problems in Friday's practice running and appeared to be behind both Ferrari and McLaren on outright pace, Webber insists the team made very few changes to the car overnight adding that varying fuel loads in play during practice had still made the true picture hard to gauge.
We didn't really know what people were doing yesterday with the fuel loads, Webber added.
It looks like people were running a little bit lighter than us, maybe.
This team works hard like a lot of other teams do in the pit lane but we keep our head down and try to keep focus, and the car was not that different to what it was yesterday apart from the fuel loads.
