Pastor Maldonado eyes qualifying improvement for Williams

The Venezuelan has shown strong race pace, but his chances of a good result have been hampered by having started just once from inside the top ten.

Maldonado reckons his team must aim to take a step forward in the grid-deciding sessions in order to have a shot at scoring better results.

"I think we need to be more focused in qualifying because we know how the car is working in the race," he said ahead of the Barcelona race on Thursday. "We need to keep this because we are quite strong, and we need to be more focused on qualifying."

He added: "Personally I will be concentrating on improving on qualifying. Starting from the back it's difficult to overtake and it's always difficult to have a good strategy because of the traffic and because of many things.

"I want to start from the front and do a good race. I think we have the pace to be competitive and to fight for a good place."

The Williams driver says, however, that his team must make sure it does not hurt its race pace in order to improve in qualifying.

"The whole package maybe can help us close the gap to the top teams in qualifying, but we don't want to damage our race pace, which is one of the strongest at the moment. We want to improve it," he added.