Of course with Lewis Hamilton being docked five places for stopping on track, Pastor Maldonado has now claimed his first front row grid position in qualifying for tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix.

Pastor Maldonado

After topping the times in Q2, Pastor drove a great lap on soft tyres to post a time of 1:22.285 putting him second overall behind Hamilton’s McLaren. After being hampered by traffic on earlier runs a frustrated Bruno Senna ended Q1 in the gravel and will therefore start 18th in tomorrow’s race but with extra sets of tyres available.

Williams’ Chief Operations Engineer, Mark Gillan says:

“Pastor’s qualifying performance was stunning today with a collection of very strong laps throughout the session which allowed us to save a set of soft tyres to fight for a decent qualifying position in Q3. To finish P2 is a great boost for the whole team and gives us a very good position from which to push hard in the race for decent points and hopefully a further belated 70th birthday present for Frank. It is obviously disappointing for Bruno to have crashed out of Q1 but we expect the race pace to be strong so points are still possible from P18.”