• British Grand Prix

Brawn pleased with Rosberg stint

ESPNF1 Staff
July 10, 2011 « Schumacher caught out by DRS | »
Nico Rosberg managed to hold off Sergio Perez during a long final stint © Sutton Images
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Ross Brawn said he was pleased with Nico Rosberg's long final stint on soft tyres as he secured sixth place in the British Grand Prix.

Rosberg started ninth and dropped out of the points early on as he had a poor start. He recovered to climb back through the field though, and held off Sergio Perez for sixth place late in the race. Brawn said the key to the result was Rosberg's ability to get to the end on his second set of dry tyres, and that it showed that Mercedes was improving its tyre usage.

"Nico's race was more straightforward," Brawn said. "But we set him a real challenge asking him to go the end of the race from lap 30, and he did an extremely solid job to achieve that. This was the first race for this car specification, with new exhaust outlets and aerodynamic developments, and we had only an hour of dry running, mainly with one car, before qualifying. With that in mind, we can be encouraged by our performance today. One of our previous difficulties had been making the tyres last properly, but both drivers managed to run over 115km on a set of options this afternoon, which suggests we have made some good progress in this area."

Rosberg himself said he was pleased with the result having qualified on the fifth row, and said he was looking forward to making the car even more competitive.

"I'm pretty pleased with our result this weekend" Rosberg said. "First of all because in qualifying we had the potential to be in the top five, and secondly we had a really good strategy in the race. My start was not good, so being able to eventually finish in sixth place is a nice result for us. And hopefully it's the start of an upward trend, before our next home race in Germany, so I'm looking forward to confirming our performance at the Nürburgring. In the next few days, we will analyse the whole weekend with our new developments on the car, and will work hard on improving it even further."

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