28/09/2002

United States Grand Prix - Qualifying Round-Up

Panasonic Toyota Racing faces an uphill struggle in tomorrow's United States Grand Prix after Allan McNish and Mika Salo qualified down in 16th and 19th places respectively for tomorrow's penultimate round of the 2002 Formula 1 World Championship.

Despite the fact that it is the team's first visit to Indianapolis four productive free practice sessions had indicated that quick progress had been made and the team was in upbeat mood making the qualifying hour even more disappointing.

Allan McNish set his best time on the second of his four qualifying runs outbraking himself into Turn 1 as he tried to improve on his third attempt. His 1m12.723s best lap was just 1.9s behind Michael Schumacher's pole position time for Scuderia Marlboro Ferrari.

"We certainly improved the car balance from this morning's practice " the Scot said "but we were struggling a bit with understeer. But at least it was consistent and we should be in better shape for the race. Everybody put in a great effort to get the best out of the car today and I'm hoping for better things tomorrow."

Team-mate Mika Salo was somewhat confused at a loss to explain why his best qualifying lap 1m13.213s was much slower than the 1m12.656s he had managed in morning free practice.

"This morning the car was reasonably good and we just made some minor changes to improve it but we completely lost the grip in qualifying and the car was much slower " the Finn explained. "We will have to go through the data to see if the changes we made affected the car dramatically or whether there is something fundamentally wrong."

"It was a really disappointing session " said team manager Ange Pasquali. "On Mika's car we lost more than half a second from this morning's time and we have to now understand why this happened. He just lost all grip. Allan did a good job and a good run at least he improved his time from earlier. The race will be hard that's for sure."

Ferrari managed to claim the front row of the grid as Rubens Barrichello backed up the world champion with second place. In third place David Coulthard achieved his best starting position for West McLaren Mercedes since Monte Carlo in May ahead of BMW Williams F1 Team drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher. Maintaining the dominance of the 'big three' teams at the front of the grid Kimi Raikkonen completed the top six qualifiers in his McLaren Mercedes.