Jaime Alguersuari's disappointing home race in Valencia continued on Saturday as he qualified only 18th of the 24 cars, after being knocked out in Q1. A technical failure had stopped him running in Friday's second practice session meaning he didn't have the experience required on the tyres, and combined with traffic on his one and only Q1 run, he failed to make the cut for Q2 by just a tenth of a second.

“That was a difficult qualifying for me, not helped by the fact I was unable to drive in Free Practice 2 yesterday, which meant I was lacking data on the tyres, which is critical here because there is a big lap time difference between the Prime and the Option,” said Alguersuari.

“On my first lap, which was always going to produce the best performance from the tyres, I got big traffic so could not do a good time. I tried again on the second lap but I was getting a lot of oversteer as the tyres were not at their best any more.

“It's a pity, as I would naturally want to do better, but at least we only used one set of tyres which leaves us in good shape for the race from a tyre point of view.”

Technical director Giorgio Ascanelli sympathised with Alguersuari, having had his weekend hampered by circumstances outside his control.

“In Jaime's case, the whole weekend has been a struggle, for reasons not of his making: yesterday we had a problem we could not solve in time to get him out for FP2 and today, I would say we let him out on track 30 seconds too late,” said Ascanelli. “He then found traffic on his first lap and that was it.”

Alguersuari starts one place behind team-mate Sébastien Buemi on this afternoon's grid.