Yvan Muller ‘not too far’ from perfect lap

Yvan Muller scored his 29th career pole position after an outstanding performance in Q3. The Frenchman believes he extracted everything out of his Citroën C-Elysée.

“If my engineer tells me I should have been half a tenth faster I will kill him, because that was as fast as I could have gone,” joked Muller. “I realised from the inside that it was a great time, I gained everything I could in every corner. It was not a perfect lap because it doesn’t exist, but that was not too far from perfect.”

Initially Muller struggled to believe pole position was possible, although engineers had warned him it could happen: “When we arrived here all the engineers said they had done the simulations and they thought we could have done the pole position, but it would have been tough. After free practice José (María López) and I did not agree with that, because we saw the situation was not easy.”

Muller praised the engineers because they pushed him to extract the maximum out of the car on his Q3 lap: “In the end we did it and the engineer was right again, but he pushed me a lot to do that lap time. I would not have done it without him. He helped me to see where I could gain some time and that was precious.”

When asked about the secret behind a scarcely believable performance gain of eight tenths, the Frenchman said there isn’t any: “There is no secret behind my performance, it’s not that easy. It’s a combination of many things, we worked hard all through practice, but we did not care about lap time.”

The result in qualifying doesn’t mean Muller’s worries about race distance are gone: “We are still worried about the race due to the ballast. I hope we will be able to preserve the tyres despite the ballast and the fact that this track stresses the tyres more. We will fight as much as we can.”

Before starting on pole position in the main race, Muller will have to occupy the tenth spot on the grid in the opening race, which starts at 12.10 tomorrow.