• Spanish Grand Prix

Maldonado wants qualifying focus from Williams

Pastor Maldonado is ten points behind his team-mate Bruno Senna in the championship standings © Sutton Images

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• Drivers:
• Pastor Maldonado

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• Williams

Pastor Maldonado wants Williams to focus on improving its qualifying pace to help make strategy easier at the Spanish Grand Prix.

The FW34 has looked impressive in race trim so far this season, with three top eight finishes despite the team having made only one appearance in Q3 courtesy of Maldonado in Australia. Speaking to reporters in the Barcelona paddock Maldonado admitted that he felt the team could achieve even better results if it was starting higher up the grid.

"Personally I've been concentrating on improving for qualifying," Maldonado said. "Because starting from the back it's always difficult to overtake, it's always difficult to make a good strategy because of the traffic and because of many things. Personally I want to start from the front and to do a good race. I think we have the pace to be competitive and to fight for a good place."

When asked if that would come to the detriment of the race pace, Maldonado insisted the Sunday performance would not be affected.

"No, I don't think so. They're completely different things. I think we need to be more focused on qualifying because we know how the car is working in the race and we need to keep this [the same] because we are quite strong. We need to be more focused on the qualifying, that's it."

Maldonado added that the team will not have many new parts on the car this weekend, but said he will only know if the updates available are an improvement after Friday practice despite the recent in-season test.

"To evaluate the Mugello test is very difficult because the kind of track is completely different. It's very quick and this track you have everything; two quick corners, a lot of medium speed corners and the slow part of the circuit which is the last sector. So you need to find a car that's well balanced against the sectors. I think that in the Mugello test we were just taking some data just to try to analyse the new parts well - which are not a lot for us at the moment - and we will continue tomorrow to analyse some new parts. That will be important in free practice because we have more data here, so it's going to be a bit easier because we can compare against the winter tests."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.