Qualifying - Canadian GP report: Williams Mercedes

Valtteri Bottas qualified fouth and Felipe Massa fifth after a strong day in Montreal. Both drivers felt they had the potential to qualify third, but are optimistic of challenging for a podium in the race.

Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering

I’m pleased. The guys have done a really good job to get tyre warm-up turned around and make sure the drivers were comfortable in the first sector. I’m pleased with the set-up and the balance, the engineers and drivers have done a great job. There’s just a small bitter taste in my mouth that we’re not third and fourth, but that’s just my personal competitive spirit. It was a good job by the team and the drivers today and now we need to convert this into lots of points tomorrow.

Valtteri Bottas

We need to be happy with the result. It was really, really close. On the last run there was some traffic which cost the opportunity to improve the time, but luckily I had done a good lap on the first run in Q3. We’ve been competitive all weekend so I’m looking forward to the race. I’m very happy with the car, we’ve made so much progress. I know we can challenge Red Bull here and we have great straightline speed, so we’ll see.

Felipe Massa

It was a good session, definitely our car shows good performance. It was very tight from position three to six, with five cars in one tenth, so P3 was possible. Unfortunately I didn’t have the perfect lap and it wasn’t enough to be third, but I cannot be disappointed. I feel really happy for the car we have. The race is long so let’s try to do a good one tomorrow, I’m confident we can have a good, competitive race.