Fahrerstimmen – Tag 2

“This first pole position brings me a lot of emotions, even if I’m trying to stay as cool as possible, as there are no points for pole position and the race is tomorrow. It has been a great day and a great weekend overall for the team so far, so I hope it will continue tomorrow. I said it was a question of putting everything together for qualifying and it seems I did it, unlike what happened in the first race. It’s an amazing feeling but now we have to focus on the race and try to bring home the best possible result tomorrow. I feel more comfortable in the car lap after lap so I’m satisfied. Before the race we will talk with the team to find the perfect strategy in order to give the Scuderia the best possible result. The start will probably be the key as the track is dirty and it’s easy to have wheelspin”.

“Today we were in the fight. The main thing is we are back where we want to be. It’s tomorrow that counts, but for today we can certainly be very happy as we are in a much better place than two weeks ago. Today it’s about Ferrari and about Charles who did a very very good job and nailed his laps in Q3 and he deserved to be on pole. He’s a good kid, actually, a good man, because once you get a pole in Formula 1 you are a man! It’s a big achievement and I am happy for him. Chapeau! Our one lap pace was there the whole weekend and we were able to confirm this in qualifying. I’m a lot happier today and it’s good to see that we are back on the right track”.

"Das Qualifying hat richtig Spaß gemacht und es war großartig, unsere Fortschritte über das Wochenende hinweg zu verfolgen. Herzlichen Glückwunsch an Charles, er hat klasse Arbeit abgeliefert und sich heute seine erste Pole Position verdient. Ferrari hatte das gesamte Wochenende über eine starke Pace. Wir haben hart daran gearbeitet, den Abstand zu verringern, aber sie waren richtig schnell auf den Geraden und dort haben wir heute viel Zeit verloren. Unser Auto fühlte sich ordentlich an. Ich glaube, dass diese Strecke unserem Wagen in der Vergangenheit aus irgendeinem Grund noch nie besonders gut gelegen hat. Aber wir haben es heute ziemlich gut hinbekommen. Hoffentlich fühlt es sich morgen ebenfalls gut an. Uns erwartet ein sehr hartes Rennen, es wird körperlich sehr anstrengend und auch hart für die Reifen. Aber im Vorjahr war unsere Rennpace gut. Deshalb hoffe ich, dass es in diesem Jahr genauso sein wird. Dieser enge und spannende Kampf gefällt mir. So sollte es immer sein."

"Platz vier ist kein besonders befriedigendes Ergebnis, aber es ist auch kein Weltuntergang. Ich lag nur ein paar Hundertstel hinter Lewis und ich denke, dass Ferrari heute schneller gewesen ist. Somit lag die Pole für uns heute wohl außer Reichweite. Ferrari hatte das ganze Wochenende über eine starke Pace, aber das war keine Überraschung. Sie haben eindeutig die Lösung für ihre Schwierigkeiten aus Melbourne gefunden. Wir haben im Verlauf des Wochenendes einige gute Fortschritte gemacht, aber sie haben die Oberhand behalten. Schlussendlich kommt es aber aufs Rennen an. Unsere Rennpace sieht ziemlich stark aus und ich glaube, dass wir mit Blick auf die Reifen gut dabei sein sollten. Es dürfte also ein spannendes Rennen werden. Ich denke, dass wir morgen vorne mitkämpfen können."

“We have been struggling with the balance of the car this weekend, especially with switching on the softest tyre. In qualifying I had a lot of oversteer and the car was sliding when I put the power down, which made it difficult to anticipate what to do in terms of balance and how to approach the corners. My single lap in Q3 was an all or nothing lap and I don’t think I left anything on the table. I am of course not happy to be behind Ferrari and Mercedes, but I’m almost pleased to be fifth, because after Q1 and Q2 it looked like we may not be fighting for that. It will be interesting tomorrow and in the race we should be more competitive as our longer runs on the medium tyre have shown good performance so far this weekend.”

“I’m happy and proud of the team today for delivering the car that I had in qualifying. To be sixth, and only a few thousands of a second from the fastest Red Bull is pretty good, and maybe a little unexpected. We were on par with them, and I hope we can give them a hard time in the race. I’m in a good starting position, so that’s the first box ticked, we’ll take it from there. Our race runs weren’t as good as our qualifying runs on Friday in practice, but I hope we can change that tomorrow and have a good race.”

“That was a good quali. I’m happy with how the session went and it’s a pity we missed out on P6 at the end. Nonetheless, I think we extracted everything from the car and P7 is a good starting position for the race. "I really want to congratulate the whole team, here and back at the factory. Getting both cars in to Q3 shows their hard work over the winter is paying off. Everyone should be proud. The job is not finished though, I want my first points of the season, so now it’s time to focus on the race. I think from P7 we have a good chance, so let's go for it.”

“We got the maximum out of our car today, and we are doing a good job. The car feels good, but we can’t predict how the race will be tomorrow because we missed our second practice session yesterday and didn’t do any long runs. The weather could take on a leading role in the race – I heard it will get windy, so we will see how that plays out.”

“Overall I thought [qualifying] was pretty good. My runs were okay in general although I made a couple of mistakes and don’t feel I did as good a job as in Australia. I know the track here more and it’s not as technical but it’s easier to make smaller mistakes. I had a little under-rotation into Turn 10, not even a lock-up, but lost a little time. “It would have been nice to be alongside Carlos and it was close. I think he was only just over a tenth ahead, so I’m reasonably happy. It’s obviously going to be difficult from P10. I don’t think these tyres are too bad but the guys behind have more choice to start on, so we’ll just have to see how it goes!”

“Qualifying wasn’t perfect for us by any means, but it’s an improvement from where we’ve been so far this weekend. In the end we were closer to Q3 than we expected at the end of Friday. We’re there or thereabouts and we know we have things to work on. I’m still learning to master this car, but I’m getting there each time I step into it. We have a free choice of tyres for tomorrow’s race, which gives us some things to assess overnight on strategy. I’ll be aiming to get the most out of it, and taking a handful of points is certainly a possibility.”

“I think we can be happy with qualifying both cars in the top 10, it’s very encouraging. It looks like we’re the most stable, in terms of performance, in the top 10, which is good. You always hope for a bit more, but I was happy to take eighth. It should be a fun race tomorrow. It’s going to be long, it’s going to be hot, there’s going to be a lot of tire degradation. I think it’s a cool track for racing, hopefully we’ll bring some good points back home.”

“After FP3 I went into Qualifying a bit on the back foot, so we decided to do three runs in Q1 to get me through to Q2. I only had one lap in Q2, which was a bit scruffy – I made a mistake and went wide in the last corner. I don’t know how close I was to Raikkonen but I think we missed out on Q3 because I ran wide, so I’m a bit disappointed with that. However, looking at how the weekend went beforehand, I was happy with how we got everything together for Qualifying. In FP2 we looked pretty strong in our race simulations, and there’s even a few things we learnt today that we can take into tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to racing here, especially because this is a track you can overtake on!”

“For sure it was not an ideal qualifying and since the beginning of the weekend we have struggled, especially with the rear of the car. We already tried to improve it, but I haven’t had a good feeling with it, and when it’s as tight as today I think we missed out by about six hundredths. It is really important to put everything together but it just didn’t happen today. The car has potential so we just need to find the direction to get the best out of it and this is a track where we can recover. We will push tomorrow massively, we want to score points and clearly get a better result than this. I saw that Charles achieved his first pole position today, he deserves this as he was fast all weekend, so congratulations to him.”

“A disappointing result tonight, but that’s where we are at the moment. We took a few steps forward after practice, but it seems everybody else did as well. I had some issues with my car in Q2 because I lost bits of my bodywork – around the barge board, which didn’t help. I hope we can recover some performance once we fix it. Even though we are not happy with our speed today, we can’t allow ourselves to drop our heads. It’s a long race tomorrow and a lot can happen. With a good start and the right strategy, I believe we could come away with some points.”

“It wasn’t the best Qualifying for us today, we didn’t do the final run in Q2 so it’s hard to judge how we would have gone, but I think we had a chance for Q3. Something was missing in the car, so we will review what that was. We had a clear idea of what we wanted to do in the last run of Q2, so it’s just unfortunate we didn’t get the chance to do it. Now we turn our focus to the race tomorrow, we’ll have to fight harder but I think we will be competitive.”

“It has not been an easy weekend until now. The second session would have been very important for us yesterday to see where we will stand in qualifying and the race. We don’t really know what to expect from the race tomorrow. The conditions will be quite different to what we experienced in FP1 and FP3, so we will do our best to have a good race and fight our way forward in this tight midfield.”

“We unfortunately suffered a couple of issues with the car at the worst possible time during qualifying. We lost performance and there was no chance of fixing anything in a short amount of time. We need to understand and fix these problems so they don’t happen again. I’ve felt good in the car all weekend, so it’s a shame to miss out on a top ten grid slot for the race. Hopefully we can make something out of tomorrow, it’s going to be tough from so far back, but we’ll be giving it our best.”

“It was a tough one today: we struggled with grip but in all honesty I didn’t deliver the best lap in Q1. So there was the potential to reach Q2 and be a bit higher up the grid. I made a couple of errors – running wide through turn seven, which hurt me through turn eight as well. Those two or three tenths lost cost me the chance to progress to Q2. Looking ahead to the race, I’m staying positive and focussing on the good race pace we showed in Melbourne. It’s tomorrow that really counts so let’s see what happens and try and make the most of the strategy to bring ourselves into play for the points.”

It was a very difficult session, for whatever reason the car wasn’t handling anywhere near as great as it was yesterday in FP2. My laps were really messy and far from the potential of the car, which is a shame. We know we are not fighting in the mid-pack but we still need to optimise what we have, and today we didn’t do that.

It was a reasonable session. It is a difficult situation and we have a few things to check as again, we could have bettered some things. For sure, the lost camera from the nose on the last flying lap didn’t help but it would have only changed one position. It is currently more about understanding the things we need to do in order to improve, and to be ready when the car improves so in the future we can extract the maximum from it.