• Chinese Grand Prix

Safety car cost me podium - Kubica

Robert Kubica loses a position to Lewis Hamilton © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• Chinese Grand Prix

• Championship:
• FIA Formula One World Championship

• Drivers:
• Robert Kubica
• |
• Vitaly Petrov

• Teams:
• Renault

Renault's Robert Kubica said a safety car period cost him a chance of a podium finish at the Chinese Grand Prix.

Kubica elected to stay out on slick tyres at the first sign of rain - a decision that gave him, Jenson Button and Nico Rosberg a 50-second lead over a group of drivers that chose to pit. However, when the safety car came out to allow marshals to clear debris from the track, the field was bunched up again.

"It was an exciting race today and it's good to have scored some more points," said Kubica. "At the start of the race I made a bad start and lost a lot of positions, but we made the right decision to stay out on slicks when it started to rain and I was able to move up through the field into third place. However, the critical moment of my race was when the safety car came out, which ended my hopes of a podium because I lost the big lead I had to the cars behind me. So although I'm happy to finish fifth, I still feel a bit frustrated to have missed a podium."

Team-mate Vitaly Petrov scored the first points of his F1 career and praised his team's strategy for the good result.

"I'm happy to finish my first race in Formula One and to score my first points. It was a difficult race and it wasn't easy to make the right decisions today," he said. "In the beginning, when it started to rain, some drivers came in for intermediates, but we decided to stay out on slicks, which was the right decision. Then I kept talking on the radio with the team to decide when we would change to intermediates, and again we got the timing right. When I changed to my second set of intermediates, I knew it would be important to look after the tyres, but we didn't know if it would continue raining or if the track would dry out. But I kept pushing, the engineers told me that I had good pace, and in the final laps I had some good overtaking moves, especially with Schumacher and Webber, to gain some more places."

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