• British Grand Prix - FP2

Race pace still a problem - Rosberg

Nico Rosberg was quickest by 0.3s in FP2 © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• British Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Nico Rosberg

• Teams:
• Mercedes

Nico Rosberg believes he will be strong in qualifying for the British Grand Prix but says race pace is still a problem for Mercedes.

After a wet morning session, Rosberg set the fastest time of FP2 which was held in predominantly dry conditions. While he feels his time shows that the car has retained its impressive pace over one lap Rosberg said the heavy fuel runs had also shown Mercedes to be unable to translate that in to speed over a race distance.

"The afternoon went well," Rosberg said. "On one lap I think the car is still quick as we have seen in the last few months so qualifying should be OK, and then the only question mark is our race speed. We practiced for the race speed today, it seemed to be OK, decent, but I'm sure it's still going to be a little bit of a problem for us.

"The next thing is that it's going to be another 10 degrees more tomorrow and Sunday, and that could completely change the picture again. That will probably make it a little bit more difficult for us so we will just have to wait and see and make the most of it."

Despite his pace Rosberg also said he wasn't yet happy with the balance of his car and gave an example of the kind of set-up problems the team will face.

"Not yet, no. I kind of went in backwards in to the high-speed corners which was not good so I still have to sort that out. The difficult thing is to understand what it is that's doing that so we have to do a lot of analysis now to try and figure it out. If you take front wing out OK it helps that area but then it makes everywhere else worse so you have understeer in the middle of corners.

"You want to do something that really just affects the entry in to high-speed corners which for example is where the car is the lowest because the faster you go the more the air pushes the car in to the ground. So it could be that the diffuser isn't working properly going in to high-speed corners because it's just stuck to the ground so it can't work properly; that's one example of things that we have to look at."

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