Albers Hopeful for the Race

After losing some valuable time on Friday, Albers recovered well and showed Minardi are making progress by finishing over half a second in front of Jordan rival Narain Karthikeyan.

"I'm glad today's qualifying went well, and now we'll wait to see how the performance of the car is in the race tomorrow," said Albers, 18th fastest.

"We had some bad luck at the beginning of the weekend and lost quite a bit of time in the garage on Friday, but hopefully, we can get it together for the race so the car remains well balanced."

Albers also finished in front of teammate Robert Doornbos, who was left lamenting a driving error on his flying lap. The Dutchman finished down in 19th position.

"We did some good work this morning and I think found a good race set-up for the car. We had to make a slight compromise for qualifying, and I had a bit of a moment in Turn One with the brakes and ran wide.

"I tried to recover the rest of the lap, but then had another moment in the third sector. I therefore couldn't get the optimum lap time, as I would have liked, but for the race, on used tyres, the car is very good, so we are definitely feeling optimistic for tomorrow."