Caterham looking to Sunday after Hungarian GP quals yield little gains

Caterham drivers had a tough go of it in Saturday’s qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, earning the 19th and 20th starting spots for tomorrow’s race with Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov.

But despite the qualifying struggles that left him with a best time of 1:23.576, Kovalainen claims that he has a good feeling for the CT01 chassis heading into Sunday’s event.

"In qualifying I think I got as much out of the car as I could today. I'm very happy with that last lap, as we made no mistakes and I'm pleased with the final balance of the car,” Kovalainen. “We'll look ahead now to tomorrow's race and keep pushing as always. It could get interesting if there are showers, but overall I feel we're making the most of what we've got and we just need to work on improving the performance of the car.”

Vitaly Petrov, Caterham

Photo by: xpb.cc

Petrov was also upbeat about his car after a top lap of 1:24.167, and said that things could have gone a bit better on his last qualifying run if he had gotten Turn 11 perfect.

“In qualifying I think we made exactly the right calls on strategy and with the decision to do two runs on the option tires,” Petrov reported. “I had a good first run but on my second run we went for one flying lap to make the most of the track conditions and unfortunately I ended up losing time in turn eleven which affected my final laptime.

"Despite that, I'm very happy with the set up of the car, and I feel we have progressed well this weekend,” he continued. “Tomorrow is another day and I think we can have a good race, as we have had all season.”

"Overall it has been a positive day. Both drivers performed as well as could be expected with the performance levels that we have at the moment,” said Caterham CEO Riad Asmat. “It's good to see we are a little bit closer to the teams ahead, but we know we still have a lot more work to do to get to where we want to be. We have performed well on Sundays throughout the season, and there is no reason why we cannot sign off for the August break with a positive result from both sides of the garage.”