Glock pins hope on race strategy

Toyota has struggled for pace throughout the weekend, but Glock is hopeful that he can repeat his Hungarian Grand Prix performance, where he finished sixth from 13th on the grid despite struggling for pace in qualifying.

Glock will start the race as one of the heaviest cars, at 697.4kg, meaning that he will run a long first stint in an attempt to get in among the points contenders. However, tyre degradation problems are likely to prevent him running a one-stop strategy.

"Our guys are quite clever in terms of race strategy and we know that the race pace should be OK," he told AUTOSPORT. "I'm a bit concerned about the degradation of the tyres, because it has been a bit high in practice, but the track evolution will help.

"It's difficult to understand even for us at the moment why we are qualifying not at the top, but in the race we are bloody quick. I don't have an explanation.

"In qualifying, for us it's so on the edge to make Q3. We have to find out why that is and really try to improve on that."

Glock believes that making Q3 might have been possible with a perfect lap - and was on course to make it, only to lose several tenths of a second when his tyres went off in the final sector of his best lap.

"I was quite happy with my qualifying performance," said Glock. "The car felt good and was drivable, but the lap time just wasn't there.

"On the first outing on prime tyres I thought it was going to be really difficult because the car was nowhere. Then on the first set of options it was much better and we just managed to get into Q2.

"Then on the first run in Q2, the car felt OK and I was very surprised to do a 39.0. With another couple of tenths on a 150% I could maybe get into Q3.

"Until Turn 16 I was on a chaos lap, I would say! I managed to squeeze out a couple of extra tenths here and there, but damaged the rear tyre and in the last sector it was destroyed and I lost all that time."