Happy to have finished ahead of one Marussia: Karthikeyan

Greater Noida - India’s Formula One driver Narain Karthikeyan said Saturday he was happy to start from the penultimate spot ahead of at least one of the Marussias in his home Grand Prix at the Buddh International Circuit.

Karthikeyan will be starting at the 23rd place behind HRT team mate Pedro de la Rosa and ahead of Marussia-Cosworth‘s Charles Pic in Sunday’s race.

“Overall I’m happy with the performance we showed in the qualifying session. On my second run I made a mistake on lap 10 which cost me a couple of tenths but the large amount of cars on the track was the main problem as we didn’t find a gap to go as quick as we would have liked,” said Karthikeyan.

The Indian driver said the car has improved and hoped to make some progress Sunday.

“I’m happy because we finished ahead of one of the Marussias, my time was almost identical to Pedro’s and we’ve got good pace so we can be satisfied. The car has improved and tomorrow we will try to continue progressing to achieve a good result in front of my home crowd,” he said.

De la Rosa said his team didn’t find the lap they were hoping for, but did complete a very good qualifying session.

“With the first set of tyres the car performed very well and I was able to complete three clean laps. However, with the second set and with more rubber on the track when times could be improved significantly, I encountered a lot of traffic and I was unable to complete a clean lap. The car was better today than yesterday and we could’ve been even quicker but with the traffic it was impossible. But the positive thing is that we qualified well at a difficult track and the car improved so I hope to achieve a better result tomorrow,” he said.