Marussia bags double car finish

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F1 Grand Prix, GP Great-Britain, Silverstone Circuitgb

Marussia's Jules Bianchi and Max Chilton ended the Team’s home race at Silverstone in 16th and 17th positions respectively after a testing British Grand Prix in general. Neither Jules’ nor Max’s race was blighted by the tyre issues which affected a number of other drivers, however the team was unable to extract the maximum from the cars today.

Jules Bianchi, #22, MR02-02, 16th: “Generally a difficult race, which began with quite a bad start. After that I just had to follow Charles, but it was a fight to stay with him as the Caterham was a bit stronger today. We decided to pit early but then the first safety car period followed and so that didn’t work out for us. For the rest of the race it was the same story until the last safety car, which could have been another opportunity to get past, but although the gap was narrow we were unable to get by. It has not been a straightforward weekend and we have just a couple of days to get to grips with that before we head to Germany, where we hope for better things.”

Max Chilton, #23, MR02-03: “Today has been a day that I will never forget. I was really psyched on the grid and got a great start, which helped. I got past Jules and Pic at the start, they passed again and then I took back position and we had a really close tussle for the first few laps. They just had a little bit better pace for a few laps and I dropped behind Van Der Garde. I got passed him again right towards the end and we would have been fine but then the safety car came out and he had just pitted, so that worked out really well for him. He had the final 10 laps on new tyres and I was on old tyres, so we had a great fight, but I managed to keep him behind me at the end. All in all, an eventful weekend with so many experiences to take away with me.”

John Booth, Team Principal: “We came into today with fantastic weather for our home event, which was great news for the fans. The strategy for this race was always going to be difficult as, similar to Canada, we saw a big shift in track conditions between the long runs we completed on Friday and the race. Overall I think we handled both tyres well. The engineers and pit crew worked well together today to execute pretty much the plan that we intended to start the race with, but unfortunately we lacked the pace to be able to allow Jules to challenge Pic. Max had a race-long battle at various stages with Giedo but ultimately came out on top, which is great news for him considering he was quite disappointed after qualifying yesterday. Overall we are slightly disappointed that we have slipped back a little, but already we have some good ideas on how we can make immediate improvements to the set-up for Germany to put us right back where we have been.”