Fahrerstimmen – Tag 2

Was für ein ganz besonderes Gefühl. Es ist erst meine zweite Pole und hoffentlich folgen noch viele weitere. Meine Runde im Q3 war gut, aber nicht ganz perfekt. Heute kam es nur darauf an, Vertrauen ins Auto zu entwickeln. Ich habe es gut abgestimmt und es ist super, meine zweite Karriere-Pole eingefahren zu haben. Jetzt konzentriere ich mich auf mein eigenes Rennen und blicke morgen nicht nach hinten. Aber natürlich werden wir Ferrari nicht unterschätzen. Es wird eng und sollte ein interessantes Duell werden. Hoffentlich kann sich Lewis nach vorne kämpfen, sodass wir ein starkes Punkteergebnis für das Team einfahren können. Morgen könnte das Wetter eine wichtige Rolle einnehmen. Aber da ich von Platz eins starte, würde ich mich nicht beklagen, sollte der Regen ausbleiben. Das Auto fühlt sich großartig an, besonders mit viel Sprit an Bord. Ich bin bereit für den Sieg. Das ist mein einziges Ziel. Russland liegt schon zu lange zurück.

“In the second run I was hoping to jump Bottas and I think I could have done better, but in the end I am pretty happy with my lap; the car is very good. Mercedes is always very quick in qualifying, but today we were close. I think it should be fine tomorrow. It will be a long race and many things can happen. The most important thing is that the car was good in qualifying. We will try to do our race and look forward. For sure it will be tough, but let’s see what we can do”

“The whole weekend had been quite tricky so far and yesterday, for certain reasons, we did not have a very good day. This morning, we basically started from zero. The feeling with the car was getting better and better, but it was not easy to recover from yesterday. The qualifying session was a bit messy, with the traffic and the yellow flags. I’m not very happy overall, but considering how tricky it has been , third place is not bad. It could have been much worse. Later this evening and tomorrow morning we will go through all the different scenarios and we’ll try to pick the best one, depending on what happens in the first lap, how the weather will be and other factors”.

“It’s a bit tricky out there. This year the track has a lot of grip on it and that kind of makes it harder. You feel you can push more but it’s easy to go over the limit because we carry so much corner speed. We all obviously love going fast and want more and more, so we end up getting greedy and then mistakes happen, but that makes it exciting. Of course it would have been nice to finish that last lap but in the end I’m happy with the top five and we’ll move up to fourth because of Lewis’ penalty. All in all it was a pretty good session and I’m relatively happy. I believe there is a bit of rain coming tomorrow at noon so it should be interesting and not that straight forward. Lewis will try to come up the ranks as well so it will be exciting.”

“You can never predict qualifying but it was reasonable today. I hoped for a little better balance in the car but overall it was not too bad. I tried a lot of different lines at turn three and all the time I was losing the rear of the car. On my final run I was gaining time but I didn’t get DRS down the straight as Grosjean was stopped on track. You lose easily two and a half tenths on that straight if you don’t have DRS. I tried to get a little more out of the next corners but I picked up the throttle maybe a little too early at turn seven and lost the rear. Tomorrow I don’t think we are quite there in terms of speed to fight with Mercedes and Ferrari, but as we have seen a lot can happen in the race so anything is possible. If there is a bit of a mix of conditions that could be good for us and with a good strategy you never know. There is a lot of orange everywhere in the grandstands which is really nice to see, so we will try and put on a good show for everyone.”

“We’ve been quick all weekend, Kevin and I. We’ve both been pretty happy with the car. Unfortunately, Kevin had the suspension issue in Q1, otherwise I think he would’ve been up there with us. In between Q1 and Q2 we found some performance. We had good grip in the car. I think we just lost an electric connection on the car at the end. I’m hoping it’s nothing more serious than that. It’s a long race tomorrow. It’s going to be tough on the brakes, tough on the engine and tough physically. It’s the second time this year though, after Melbourne, where I feel the tires are working well and I can really enjoy myself and push the car to the limit.”

“I’m feeling happy with our performance today. I think it was one of my best qualifying sessions when you consider how difficult things have been leading up to the session. I was P17 in second practice and P18 in final practice this morning. So to end qualifying in eighth place shows the mega steps we have taken to improve the car. It’s been a huge effort by the whole team. I was a bit unlucky with the yellow flag at the end of the session because there was an opportunity to improve my time. I’m really looking forward to this race and I think we will be even stronger in race conditions. We need to keep an eye on the weather, but wet or dry I think we can have a great race tomorrow.”

Das war ein frustrierender Tag für mich. Ich hatte die Chance, heute Schnellster zu sein. Aber ich habe es auf der letzten Runde im Q3 leider nicht alles zusammenbekommen. Ich bin von meiner Performance im Q3 enttäuscht: Es wäre großartig gewesen, eine bessere Runde zu zeigen. Aber es hat nicht sollen sein. Valtteri hat fantastische Arbeit abgeliefert und sich die Pole geholt. Das Getriebeproblem hat mich während des Wochenendes nicht beschäftigt. Aber nach dem Qualifying bemerkt man dann, dass man weiter hinten losfahren muss. Ich glaube, dass es schwierig wird, morgen nach vorne zu kommen. Das Feld liegt viel enger zusammen als 2014, als ich mich bis auf Platz zwei vorgekämpft habe. Aber vielleicht spielt das Wetter ja eine Rolle. Ich werde so hart es geht arbeiten, um eine Aufholjagd zu starten und so viele Punkte wie möglich mitzunehmen. Wir haben immer noch eine großartige Pace und das Auto war hier bislang fantastisch. Ich weiß also, dass ich ein Auto habe, um es zu schaffen. Warten wir ab, wie es morgen ausgeht.

“I am not completely happy with ninth place, given all that happened in the session, but it’s still a good starting position. My fastest lap in Q3 was set on used tyres, but the yellow flags meant I couldn’t finish my attempt on fresh tyres. I feel I could have been a couple of places higher up, but it’s the way racing goes sometimes – you have to take your chances when you can. We need to review if there is something we could have done better, but I am still feeling positive about the weekend. We improved a lot since yesterday and the feeling I have with the car is much better now than it was during practice. I enjoy this track and it’s a place where you can overtake so hopefully we can bring home some good points tomorrow.”

“A good qualifying! Before the weekend started, we knew this track was going to be quite tricky for us, but we found a really good set-up in FP3 that made me feel really confident with the car. As soon as the qualifying session started, we put in very competitive lap times and a P10 is a good place to start in tomorrow’s race. It’s just a shame about the yellow flags at the end of Q3 – I wasn’t able to set a time on new tyres; my Q3 lap time was done on used tyres and we’re only a tenth behind the Force India’s and Grosjean. Unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to improve, but after a tricky start to the weekend I’m happy with today’s result and I look forward to tomorrow’s race: we have a good chance of scoring points and we need to make the most out of our chances!”

“I’m satisfied with eleventh place, it’s a good effort. I put in a sweet lap at the end of Q2 and it was equally good fun to look for the last few thousands of a second. Tomorrow will be a tough race but we will get a free choice of start tyres and that’s a good position. It was a good job from the team.”

“A positive Saturday. I feel we did the maximum today – I’m happy with our laps, our result and our performance in general this weekend. “We had an unexpected change of engine, and I reverted back to the old spec today, so finishing P12 and feeling competitive all through quali was positive news. The team is working very hard to improve our situation: we bring aero updates to every race, we bring new engine specs whenever we can, and we’re definitely moving forwards. “We still need to improve our reliability, but hopefully we’ll see further signs in the next couple of weeks. “From 12th place, with a good start or a good strategy, we could be in a position to score points. There’s some possible rain forecast for tomorrow – if that turns out to be correct, it’ll probably open up more opportunities for us. We need to be ready to take them…”

“I think it’s been a pretty good weekend for us so far. “The practice sessions have gone well and qualifying was more or less what we expected. This afternoon’s times were extremely close: it all came down to a couple of small details – with another couple of tenths, we’d have been into Q3. So today really shows that every improvement we bring to the car is very valuable – it all helps. “We’re definitely headed in the right direction - every new piece of performance we bring is welcome, but we need to keep pushing.”

“How frustrating. In this afternoon’s qualifying we lost all the balance and therefore all the confidence I had in the car up until now was gone; it just felt the worst it’s been all weekend: I felt I had no grip anymore and my rear was sliding a lot; it’s really disappointing! Let’s see what we can do tomorrow, the good thing is that anything can happen on race day – we now need to evaluate all the options, look into the data and understand what’s best for us.”

“We were looking good, so it’s really frustrating not getting the whole qualifying. It’s really unfortunate to break the rear suspension. It’s just bad luck. I think we could’ve gone on to Q3 today and had a really good chance of points tomorrow. Now it looks more difficult. We had been performing well all weekend. We had good pace and were in the top-10. I’m gutted not to get anything out of it.”

“I knew qualifying was going to be tight. The car feels better and the performance is closer this weekend so it’s a shame that we couldn’t hook it up in end but there is overall progress. We’ll look to have a good start and aim to get in the points tomorrow.”

We definitely struggled to make the tyres work and get the best lap out of the car, so it was a disappointed qualifying for me and the team. I had a lot of oversteer in Turn Six, which cost me a couple of tenths. But we need to concentrate on the race tomorrow. We know that the race pace is much better than qualifying pace, but starting 17th definitely makes our life tricky and quite difficult for the race, so we need to concentrate 100 percent on that.

It is not the best day for the team as we just didn’t improve from yesterday. We have been struggling with the car all weekend and have been trying to work on the balance to improve it. We are simply losing time in the high speed corners to some of the other cars. On the positive side, we are better on our long runs than we were in qualifying on our short runs and that gives us hope going into the race. Tomorrow the race will be long and all we can do is see what happens.

„Heute lief es zwar etwas besser als gestern, mit den Plätzen 19 und 20 können wir aber natürlich nicht zufrieden sein. Was meine schnellste Runde in Q1 betrifft, konnte ich im Vergleich zu gestern zumindest den Zeitabstand zu unseren direkten Konkurrenten verringern. Wir konnten zwar Fortschritte erzielen, müssen diese aber weiterhin ausbauen. Morgen im Rennen werden vor allem die Bremsen gefordert sein.“

„Im Qualifying war leider nicht mehr möglich. Nach den gestrigen Trainings hatte ich auch heute erneut Probleme mit dem Motor, wodurch ich vor allem auf den Geraden an Zeit verliere. Nichtsdestotrotz werde ich morgen im Rennen wie immer mein Bestes geben. Das Wetter könnte auch eine entscheidende Rolle spielen.“