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Felipe Nasr thinks improving city section speed key to Macau win chances

Felipe Nasr believes he needs to improve his car's speed over the city section of the Macau Grand Prix track if he is going to win Sunday's main race

The Carlin driver finished second to Marco Wittmann in Saturday's qualification event, after fighting off race-long pressure from Roberto Merhi behind him.

And although thinking he was a match for Wittmann in terms of pace, Nasr reckons he needs to adapt his car better for the middle sector of the track if he is to have a real chance of victory.

"I quite happy with today," he explained. "It was a very difficult race to keep up the pace with the front guys there, and it was all down to the start.

"I made a very good getaway and got a very good tow going into Lisboa but it was quite tricky there. I was the car in the middle as we went three wide into the braking area.

"I was very conscious that we didn't crash and finish our race. Marco had the [inside] line to come in first, and he did that. I braked a bit earlier to make sure we didn't have any contact.

"From then on he had a very good first lap, and it was difficult to keep up with him. In the end I started to catch up a little bit, but I still think we need to improve the car in the second sector. We were losing too much time up there."

Despite Merhi having several looks up the inside of his rival at Lisboa, Nasr said he never really felt threatened by the Spaniard - although he thought his rival was being slightly too aggressive.

And he hopes that Merhi, who has had an incident-filled weekend so far, keeps it clean for the main race tomorrow.

"I could see he was much quicker down the straight, and with the momentum he was always going to brake later," said Nasr of Merhi. "It was quite safe, but sometimes he braked a bit late.

"I think he was trying too hard and we got very close to having contact there. But as long as he knows what he is doing then that's okay. I hope he doesn't mess up the race tomorrow."

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