Jaguar Pair Rue Troubled Start

Antonio Pizzonia's hopes of a good start to his first ever Malaysian Grand Prix were dashed after he was hit by mechanical problems in today's qualifying for the race.

The young Jaguar driver, making his Grand Prix debut this season, was unable to even start his flying lap. Pizzonia's problems, however, had started in practice, when he ran off the track in the hour-long session and lost his car's front wing.

The team were able to fix the wing, but the car failed to start when Pizzonia was to leave the pitlane for his flying lap, the Brazilian failing to set a lap time.

"A disappointing start to the weekend," admitted Pizzonia. "I was obviously looking forward to qualifying but lady luck went against me today. The team is investigating the cause of the start-up issue that cost me my qualifying slot. I think I missed it by around five seconds but under the new rules, it was five seconds too late and we paid the price.

"As we saw with Mark in Melbourne, you don't necessarily have to start at the front of the grid to end up racing with the front-runners under the new rules and strategies. We'll do our homework and hope that our approach isn't compromised by the problems we suffered today."

Pizzonia's teammate Mark Webber completed a hard day for the Jaguar team, and like his teammate the Australian was hit by a fuel pick-up problem. That, and a spin during practice that cost him valuable track time, did not allow Webber to get his set-up right for qualifying, and he went on to finish in 16th position.

"Apart from the fuel pick-up issue which affected both Antonio and I all day, my spin into the gravel cost me the most," he said. "I was just pushing too hard going into turn ten and lost the back end. I was surprised, however, at how much damage the gravel caused to the car and because of this, I missed all but the last five minutes of the Free Practice session.

"Because of how much time I lost today, I didn't get anywhere near enough time to work on set-up. Going into qualifying, the car felt quite good but the fuel pick-up issue kicked in and cost me some time today. Let's hope for some decent mileage tomorrow during the two morning warm-up sessions and see whether we can compensate for some of our misfortune today."