Webber to start third in Hungarian Grand Prix

For immediate release
August 23, 2003

Mark Webber equaled the best qualifying performance of his F1 career so far, after setting the third fastest time in this afternoon’s one hour qualifying session for the Hungarian Grand Prix at Budapest’s Hungaroring. The 26-year old Jaguar Racing driver will start the 70-lap race on the second row behind pole sitter, Renault’s Fernando Alonso (1min 21.688s) and Williams’ driver Ralf Schumacher (1.21.944s) after recording a time of 1min 22.027s. Juan Pablo Montoya will start alongside Webber, while his Jaguar Racing team-mate, Englishman Justin Wilson, will start 12th fastest after posting a time of 1min 23.660s.

Webber also qualified third for the Brazilian Grand Prix earlier this year.

Despite the Hungaroring not being one of Webber’s favourite tracks on the Grand Prix calendar, the Australian has consistently featured in the top six in this weekend’s practice and qualifying sessions. He was sixth fastest in Friday’s opening practice session and in provisional qualifying set the third fastest time of 1min 22.625s behind Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher.
This morning he wound up fifth fastest in practice with a time of 1min 22.848s and was fourth fastest in this afternoon’s qualifying warm-up session.

He commented, “It’s been a very satisfactory weekend for us so far, although to be honest, we did have a few reliability issues in the first session on Friday and the team did a good job to recover from that. As usual, we’ve gone quite well in qualifying today but the main focus for us is to get the best possible result on Sunday which hasn’t been easy for us in recent races. But, we’ve put ourselves in a good position to hopefully get something out of the race after two tough Grands Prix for the team.”

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