Fahrerstimmen – Tag 1

I am happy that we were able to secure pole position for tomorrow’s Sprint race, the first Sprint pole of my career. The W17 has been feeling great the entire day, and we’ve been able to make the most out of the car in today’s qualifying session. When the wind picked up in SQ3, we began to lose some speed on the straights, like others, but still managed to put all the sectors together and secure a front row for tomorrow’s race.

Despite our pace, we are cautious of the threat posed by others. We also know that anything can happen during a Sprint race, especially at the start. We’ve been working hard with the team on our getaways from the grid and have plenty of learnings from Melbourne. We will also need to focus on tyre management as we always see a lot of graining at this track.

We’ll keep working overnight to ensure a good Sprint race tomorrow but also a successful qualifying session for Sunday’s Grand Prix.

Securing a front row for tomorrow’s race is a good way to start the weekend. Congratulations to George for Sprint pole too; this continues our strong form as a team from Melbourne. Despite that, we know there is still a lot of work to do to improve. We will go through all the data from Friday and analyse how we can put ourselves in the best possible position for the Sprint but also the all-important Qualifying session. Tyre management can be challenging here, and our starts were a limiting factor last weekend; we need to put all this together to perform as best as we can and fight for victory and pole tomorrow.

The overall positive is that the car felt good all day today. We need to keep it in that good window and, if we can do so, then I think we can bring home strong points in the Sprint. I’m looking forward to racing tomorrow and continuing this first Sprint weekend of the season.

A positive Sprint Quali, I’m pleased with the lap and P3 is as good as we could have achieved today. To be ahead of both Ferraris is positive, I wasn’t sure that would be possible after FP1. Tomorrow we’ll do what we can to maximise our result in the Sprint race. The first lap is the best opportunity for overtaking, but we know the competition are strong, and then we’ll turn our attention to Qualifying in the afternoon.

I’m really pleased with how the session went today. After a tricky practice, the team did a great job getting the car into a much better window, and it felt fantastic to drive in Sprint Quali. There’s still some work to do back in Maranello to find more performance on the straights, which has been our main weakness but we’re strong through the corners, which is encouraging. Overall, the car felt good, and tomorrow’s Sprint will be a good opportunity to keep building our weekend.

A decent Sprint Qualifying. We executed a good session, the car felt pretty good and everything was smooth. There is still a big gap to Mercedes, so we need to work out how we can maximise our performance even more ahead of the Sprint and Grand Prix Qualifying tomorrow. Let’s see what we can do.

It wasn’t a great session. Unfortunately, I lost half a second on the back straight on my second lap in SQ3, and we will have to analyse the reason for that to make sure we can come back tomorrow.
We should be a bit stronger in the Sprint race than we were today, however, the front runners still seem to be a step ahead, so we will see what we can do to challenge them.

I\'m extremely pleased with today\'s result in Sprint Qualifying, especially after last week in Melbourne which didn\'t live up to our expectations. We found a lot more performance and good learnings from Australia that we carried over into this weekend. We tried to put everything together and I felt a lot better in the car, straight from the first lap out of the garage. It\'s good to be more competitive here and comfortably making it into SQ3 and mixing it with the top four teams. I\'ve been feeling good in the car and there is certainly more potential than what we showed last time out. We will try to carry this positive momentum into tomorrow and see if we can bring home some points for the team.

The whole day hasn’t been great pace wise. We have had low grip, which has been our biggest problem, and no balance unfortunately. We are losing quite a lot of time in the corners and then, of course, this starts to trigger other little problems. The big problem for us is the cornering. We will need to go away and analyse what we can do ahead of tomorrow and figure out our main limitations and we will see how we go.

We showed really good pace from pretty much lap one of FP1, and we’ve been able to build on that and move forward. It was a tough session, the balance was a bit on edge and it was difficult to put a lap together, but we got there in the end and I’m happy with P9 today. I’m quite impressed and surprised by the gap to the leaders as we’ve seemed to close it a little bit compared to last week. Prior to this weekend, I wasn’t expecting to be in the fight for the top eight because we expected the front four teams to be so far ahead, but in the end, that wasn’t really the case. It looks like if we get everything right tomorrow, we can score some points.

I can be happy with the lap that I put together, it was good. I\'m not too far off Max so that\'s a positive but I\'m not sure what happened to our pace or why we were half a second off. We need a little bit more of everything to be competitive tomorrow, we struggled with grip today and our power wasn\'t where we wanted it to be. The gap to McLaren and Ferrari was bigger than last weekend, so we need to figure out why. There\'s a still a lot to play for over the rest of the weekend.

It is a shame to miss out SQ3 by such a small margin, but overall, P11 is still a solid result. In SQ2 I lost radio communication with the team, so I had to manage part of the run on my own, which made things more complicated. Aside from that, the feeling with the car has been good since this morning. We look to be right in the midfield fight again, which is encouraging. It’s very tight out there, so we’ll take what we’ve learned today and aim to move forward tomorrow.

We\'re working hard to get the car to where we want it to be. It felt better from FP1 to Sprint Qualifying, but there are still a few things that we need to investigate to improve it for tomorrow. There\'s potential, and our understanding of the car is quite high now, so hopefully we can get on top of our issues and get the maximum out of it.

To be honest, I was actually quite happy. We have had a good step from practice to Quali with set-up and honestly it was not a bad lap. We just struggled a bit more here than last week. I think Melbourne really suited our car and here, it is not as good for us so we need to try and do some work for tomorrow. In terms of set-up I felt quite happy.

It\'s been a bit of a tricky Friday for us. We came across a few issues during Free Practice which appeared again during Sprint Qualifying, keeping us on the back foot. Of course, it\'s a different type of track from what we\'ve had so far, with different ranges of corners, and we\'re discovering once again how our car is behaving. Looking at the Sprint tomorrow, let\'s see what we can achieve. It\'s a quite short race obviously, and after that, we’ll make sure to fix any issue that is going on in the background, in order to go into qualifying in a better place and give it our best.

Not particularly happy. Considering it is my first time here and I did about two laps in FP1, to be relatively close and okay I don’t think is too bad. But P15 is not where I or the team want to be. Liam was a little bit better, but still not much more competitive. I am going to look at myself tonight, see where I can improve for tomorrow. We will also look as a collective to see what we can do to make a step for Qualifying. Main focus on the Sprint tomorrow but still looking ahead to Qualifying tomorrow.

It was tricky today and wasn\'t the result in Sprint Qualifying we had hoped for. We didn\'t take the step forward we needed to compete for places in SQ3. Ultimately, we lacked the pace today, which we need to understand why that is. We lacked pace compared to Pierre, who was quick today and did a great job, which is great for the team who are putting in a lot of work and is positive also that there\'s more potential in the car. I just need to understand more on my side how to extract it and where we can find improvements. We will try to learn as much as we can in the Sprint Race tomorrow, see if we can make up some places and put the learnings into practice for tomorrow\'s Qualifying.

This weekend was always going to be difficult for us with this circuit exposing the weaknesses in our car. Missing half of FP1 didn’t help either, as I couldn’t prepare properly for this session and had to adapt every lap. As it stands, we first need a clean weekend before aiming for better results. I\'ll use this weekend to test different setups and try to make up for the track time I’ve lost so far. The target is to maximise our performance and keep gathering learnings to help the team.

It’s been a confusing day and clearly this isn’t the result we wanted out of Sprint quali. We have multiple limitations at the moment we are trying to understand so we need to go back to the drawing board and get a clearer picture ahead of tomorrow. As always we’ll give everything we have in front of the Chinese fans for tomorrow’s Sprint race and qualifying sessions.

We did some laps in Free Practice and only managed SQ1 today. I think we did the best we could and we are still far away from the others. We will try to improve again tomorrow, complete as many laps as we can, and build our understanding of this package.

We gathered important data so that\'s a positive, but we are still battling the same issues we had a week ago in Melbourne. Ultimately, we don\'t want to be fighting for P19 and P20 so there\'s lots for us to work on, but we came to China with the main objective to continue learning more about the car.

We had a deployment issue which impacted my laps and meant we couldn’t get the most out of the session. We need to investigate fully now. Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to say where we would have ended up. We’ll try to address everything as a team ahead of the Sprint Race.

It’s a shame that we couldn’t participate in Sprint Quali. We struggled with a fuel system issue in the morning and then unfortunately we couldn’t fix it in time for this afternoon. The team is working really hard at the track and back at the factory to find a solution so we can get ready for our first Sprint tomorrow.