Montoya: "Car & tyres behaved well"

By Andrew Hooper
May 25 2002

	Montoya: Car & tyres behaved well
	Qualifying for the 2002 Monaco Grand Prix would produce an excellent result for the BMW WilliamsF1 team with Juan Pablo Montoya securing his second pole position of the session. Team-mate Ralf Schumacher will start the race on the second row of the grid after he set the fourth fastest time of the day. "The car and the tyres behaved very well today," said Montoya. "We made quite a lot of changes throughout the morning sessions and during qualifying as well and clearly we worked in the right direction. I knew the time was there from the beginning, anyway.' "I had a negative weekend here last year but this time things have been working all right so far and I am changing my mind about this track now. It is definitely pretty special to be on pole here, by four tenths, because getting a good lap together on this circuit is very difficult. I expect the tyres to be consistent also throughout tomorrow’s race." For Ralf his qualifying would, like many others be affected by traffic, when he was held up by an Arrows on his first, however managed two trouble free runs later in the session. His final run was halted by some further traffic. Ralf added: Unluckily on my first flying lap I was held up by an Arrows. Both the other runs were trouble free. I could have for sure improved a bit if in my last run I hadn’t been again held up by some traffic. We had no technical problems at all. It is clear that our tyre supplier here provides much better tyres than their competitors. Congratulations to my team mate!" For Dr Mario Theissen, BMW Motorsport Director, the result was somewhat of a surprise. He said: "We did not really expect to be on pole position on this circuit. But we have had a very good weekend so far, where everything went according to plan. Michelin obviously supplied us with very strong tyres here and Juan put everything together perfectly on his last run. Regarding the engine every session went smoothly and trouble free so far."