Fahrerstimmen – Tag 1

On Sprint weekends, it’s important to get it right, starting from FP1. We did a great job as a team to prepare the car and so it felt good to drive from the very start as well as during all the phases of qualifying. 
My lap in Q3 was good and I’m very happy, as I love racing on this track and the atmosphere in this city is amazing. Tomorrow, we start from scratch again, with the whole day given over to the Sprint, but for now we can enjoy this pole position for Sunday.

I’m very happy with P2, the pace in the car has been great and I put in a good lap to get on the front row on Sunday. There was maybe a little more in it, but I’m sure Charles [Leclerc] will be thinking that too, so overall I'm pleased with qualifying. We’ve got another chance to score a good result and important points tomorrow, so we’ll turn our focus to that now and aim to go one better in the Sprint.

I have to say a big thank you to everyone back at the factory. They have been pushing so hard to improve our car and we have taken a step closer to the front this weekend. I know everyone is working flat out for that and I appreciate all the efforts. Unfortunately today, we weren’t quite at the very front, but we will give it another shot tomorrow.

I love being in the United States! It’s such a beautiful country and this circuit is just incredible. It is definitely one of my favourites. It has a legendary layout, it’s bumpy, and all the drivers find it very tricky. Each section is an incredible challenge. I hope tomorrow we can fight for P1 again. I’ll be giving it my best shot and with this crowd, I think anything is possible.

It wasn’t a bad qualifying. I was struggling a bit in the final sector, so tomorrow I’ll try to improve there. The rest of the lap felt more or less okay and it seems we are in decent shape.
Congratulations to Charles for grabbing pole for the team. We’ll try to score some good points over the whole weekend.

It’s been a really challenging day. I’ve been off the pace, and I’ve not been able to identify why. I can definitely feel the improvements we’ve made with the update, but it’s been a strange Friday. I’ll put it on my shoulders though as the driver; I just need to work on finding out why I’ve not been as quick as I think we can be.

I’m pretty pleased with P5 as at some points it looked like we may not have even made it through to Q3. My final lap was a reasonable effort; I made a small mistake at turn one which probably cost me one more position on the grid. Turning to tomorrow, we can be encouraged. With the exception of Qatar, the Sprint Shootout on Saturday morning tends to go better for us. I will take all those positives and work on finding some more pace tonight.

It was a shame to miss out on pole with my deleted lap but I knew in Turn 19 it would be a close call. I made a mistake in Turn One so I had to really push for the rest of the lap, I didn't understeer or anything, I just really tried to maximise the corner and I misjudged it. Margins are very fine when you are pushing to the limit. Of course, it's unfortunate but it makes the Sunday race more enjoyable. Now our focus turns to the Sprint race tomorrow, we want to win that and the race on Sunday. It's a long weekend and a lot can happen, I'm going to have some fun out there that's for sure.

It’s been a good Qualifying for us and our second Q3 appearance in a row after Qatar. I’m really happy with our performance today and the car felt very good right from the start of the day, which is important on Sprint weekends with only one Practice session. We made some improvements between Practice and Qualifying and from there everything flowed well for us. It was fine margins, less than a tenth between a few cars, and I felt I extracted pretty much everything from my Q3 lap. It’s always great to be fighting for the top positions. Tomorrow is the Sprint; we will be aiming for more of the same and hopefully be in contention to take some points.

There was probably a bit more on the table today but, nonetheless, we are in a great starting position for Sunday’s race to able to fight for points. Our day started with a busy Free Practice session and we got through our programme without issues. We were able to turn things around quickly to be ready for Qualifying and the team did a great job to be on it right from the get-go and we managed things well to get through to Q3. Our focus now turns to the Sprint Shootout and Sprint Race where points are on offer so it will be important to carry this momentum into Saturday.

It wasn’t a straightforward one out there today. I was struggling with the balance from low speed to high speed, especially in the low speed, we had made some changes that probably didn’t help us in the way we thought. The margins were so tight today that a tenth would have made your qualifying so different, but we are on the wrong side of it. Hopefully tomorrow we have a better Sprint Shootout and then get some points on the board, we are expecting some changes in the conditions, there will be a lot of wind around.

Not my best qualifying. The pace in the car was quite strong, I just didn’t get it together. We’ll try again tomorrow. The pace we have is pretty solid, so if we leave out the mistakes, we should be able to get a better result in the Sprint Shootout tomorrow.

I’m happy with my performance, but I think that a minimal difference in my driving would’ve allowed me to get into Q3, so I feel frustrated. However, some teams in front of me have both their cars in the top 10, so I feel like we extracted the performance our car had today. P11 isn’t a bad position to start in on Sunday because it’s close to the points, so I’m looking forward to it. Our race pace this morning during FP1 didn’t look bad, so the potential is there for tomorrow and Sunday. It’s good to have Daniel back. It’s not easy to have one Free Practice session and immediately go into qualifying, because there’s not a lot of time to get up to speed, but he did a good job and has already given good feedback, and that’s why we were able to finish in P11.

I believe, looking at today’s results, that we can definitely be in the mix for points on Sunday; we made an improvement as a team, despite struggling a bit during Free Practice. Between the sessions, we were able to improve our car balance, which allowed us to build some rhythm in qualifying and to get in the fight for Q3, ultimately missing it by less than three thousandths of a second: a positive result, but with some mixed feelings as we could have potentially made a further step forward. Still, we can consider ourselves satisfied with the job done today, and I am confident it’ll also allow us to have a much cleaner Saturday. The leading teams clearly have an advantage in terms of pace, but I reckon we can definitely challenge our main competitors and climb our way into the top ten on Sunday.

Today’s result wasn’t bad, and I think it’s promising to be this close to the top ten: with a decent start, we’ll be able to build something on it and fight for points in Sunday’s race. It is hot out there, but with less humidity, which makes it more comfortable to drive compared to the most recent events, like Singapore and Qatar. Finding the right balance with just one hour of practice is not easy, and there are obviously things that could be improved, but it’s probably the same for everyone else: I think my biggest struggle today were my tyres overheating in the last sector, which made putting together a clean lap more difficult, especially where hundredths of seconds can make the difference. Still, we’re not far from the top ten, which is the main positive from today. Tomorrow will be a standalone day, with its own qualifying and race: our main focus remains on Sunday’s main event, but we will still look out for any opportunity to score a few points.

There’s been some positive signs today with the upgraded car, and I don’t think we’ve maximized it, I think there’s more in it and I’m excited to see how it performs in the Sprint tomorrow. The race on Sunday is of course the big question, to see if we can look after our tires a little bit better. I don’t think we were expecting to be much more competitive over one lap, I think we’re hoping to solve some of the inconsistency issues, especially race performance.

It's good to be back. There was nothing physically holding me back today, so it was about finding the feeling in the car and the setup. It’s hard to predict what we could’ve done with only one hour in the car this morning and then straight into qualifying, but the last lap was already feeling a little poor. It’s difficult to only have one session where you have to set the car up for what it is for qualifying. It was a shame because we were fighting a little bit from the start, but as the track started to ramp up, we plateaued a little bit. I feel I could've given more, but we have another chance tomorrow, and the wind direction might change, so that can play a role. We’ll try and see what we can discover tonight, to learn from it for tomorrow. I wish I wasn’t starting P15, but it’s nice to be back behind the wheel and result aside, it’s been an enjoyable day.

It was an unfortunate second run in qualifying, it was the second lap that mattered with the track evolution that we had today, but we got disturbed. We had both Red Bulls interfering with the lap in awkward places which made me lose quite a bit of time and that made the difference. It’s the first day that we’ve run the new updates and after only one hour of practice and qualifying, we need to go through it and understand it more. This morning I wasn’t happy at all with the car, but we made some good set-up changes and it felt much better. I think we could’ve gone a long way today, so it’s very frustrating.

Not an ideal Qualifying for us with both cars out in Q1. There was a lot of traffic today and we completed our out lap with around one second left to the chequered flag. We started too close to the cars in front. I don’t think this helped. It was very close between lots of cars with just a few tenths being the difference. We had a difficult FP1 with some issues and we weren’t able to optimise the new package we brought to Austin. We are in parc fermé now so we will see what we can do tomorrow with hopefully a cleaner day.

The car was quite different from FP1, feeling a little disconnected which can happen when the wind picks up. It meant that to get a clean lap it was very difficult, and my lap just wasn’t that good. The car was better than Q1 today, so it’s a bit frustrating.

Going into Qualifying with only five laps in FP1 was always going to be a challenge, but I actually felt like I got to grips with the AMR23 pretty quickly. The problem today was that we just didn’t have the pace. We’d hoped for a bit more, so it’s a disappointing result, but this is a good track to race at and overtaking is possible, so there will be opportunities on Sunday.

Too bad I wasn’t great today, but it was nice to drive on home turf. It was a really tricky session. The car felt completely upside down from this morning so it’s strange. We’ll have to look into it and see what we can do better tomorrow.