SA lose out on grid position by tenths of a second

By nGO
October 21 2006

Qualifying was a close fought battle at the back with Yamamoto just slightly behind Sato, who himself qualified to within a tenth of Coulthard and Albers. Sato will start the race 19th sharing a row with Yamamoto in 20th, after Doornbos's engine change.

Super Aguri made good progress on both days, which showed in qualifying as Sato was less then half a second away from making it to the second session. The first qualifying session was closely fought at the back of the grid, but Super Aguri narrowly lost out on position, qualifying 0.01 behind Coulthard, and 0.1 behind Spyker's Albers. The team is optimistic for a good performance tomorrow, Sato believes he has a good car underneath him.

Setting a best time of 1:13.269, Sato will start the race from 19th on the grid, "It was good to have a close and competitive qualifying at the end of the season. Today, in free practice, we made good progress that we carried over from yesterday and we were happy with the performance of the car. In qualifying we improved our lap time again, but it was unfortunate that we could not beat our nearest rivals. However, I believe that we have a good race car and that we are in a good position for tomorrow."

Yamamoto set a respectable time of, 1:13.357 and will lineup 20th along side team mate Sato, "This morning we improved the balance of the car from our limited running yesterday and made good progress on the set-up for qualifying and the race tomorrow. I am happy with my qualifying result today because I feel that I have been able to show my potential without any problems for the first time since Monza, so I am very happy and I would like to thank everybody in the team."