Fahrerstimmen – Tag 2

Es ist keine einfache Strecke und Valtteri war das gesamte Wochenende über schnell. Deshalb bin ich sehr glücklich, dass ich das Potential aus dem Auto herausholen konnte. Das Team hat fantastische Arbeit abgeliefert. Ich konnte mich immer weiter heranarbeiten und die letzten beiden Runden haben gepasst. Gleichzeitig nahm der Wind zu und es gab auf der Strecke einige ziemlich starke Windböen. Auf der letzten Runde lag ich beinahe eine halbe Sekunde vorne, aber dann habe ich die Zeit in der vorletzten Kurve verloren, als mich am Ende eine Windböe erwischte. Aber ich war trotzdem noch schneller als auf meiner bis dahin besten Runde. Ich bin einfach überglücklich. Wir haben richtig hart gearbeitet und alles in allem war es großartige Teamarbeit. Morgen wird erneut ein heißer Tag, was eine Herausforderung für die Reifen darstellen wird. Ich bin gespannt, wie es ausgehen wird.

Alles in allem war es bislang ein gutes Wochenende für mich, aber Lewis ist im Q3 ein paar starke Runden gefahren, die ich leider nicht schlagen konnte. Ich bekam die Kombination aus Kurve acht und neun nicht ganz richtig hin und habe dort auf meinem ersten Versuch im Q3 eineinhalb Zehntel auf ihn verloren. Davon abgesehen sahen unsere Rundenzeiten ziemlich ähnlich aus. Auf dem zweiten Versuch hatte ich keinen Windschatten auf den Geraden, wodurch es nahezu unmöglich war, mich noch einmal zu verbessern. Morgen scheint uns eine Herausforderung zu erwarten. Die Wettervorhersage sagt sehr hohe Temperaturen voraus, was es für die Reifen besonders knifflig machen wird. Es wird also alles andere als einfach. Aber es ist eng, ich fühle mich gut und die Punkte werden erst morgen vergeben.

“It has been a good weekend so far and I have felt comfortable in the car since FP1. For the past few weeks, my main target has been improving the car set up in order to suit the track evolution from Q1 to Q3. From this point of view, I am satisfied with my personal performance and have definitely made a step forward. On the other hand, we are not where we should be, relative to our competitors in terms of lap times. We have a lot of work to do and I will push to have a good start in order to challenge them during the race tomorrow.”

“After making some improvements to the car we had a good qualifying compared to practice. In Q3 I think we could have been closer to Ferrari but my final lap wasn’t very clean. Something happened in the last few corners and the car had an odd behavior, so we need to check that, otherwise I think we could have been closer to Ferrari. At the moment it looks like McLaren are very close but we should have three or four tenths on them. Again, we maximised our grid position and it’s good to be on the second row and starting on the medium tyre. I think we need a bit of luck for a podium, like we had last year, as this is not really our track with the circuit layout but tomorrow will be all about tyre management. I’m not sure we can fight Mercedes but I hope we can fight Ferrari. We will of course give it a good go and see how far we can get.”

“Coming into qualifying after yesterday and FP3, things were looking pretty good. Maybe not so much after FP3 – it got a lot closer than it was yesterday – but we were expecting that and weren’t worried. But it was still going to be very close. “We made a couple of tweaks before quali, which I think helped. We did what we needed to do and I managed to do a decent lap. I messed up the last corner, getting a bit eager and overshot a little bit. Apart from that, it’s obviously a good result – but tomorrow’s the long one. Big thanks to the team.”

“First of all, big congratulations to the whole team and also the team back at the factory. I think this is a consequence of all the hard work that is going on back there, and the upgrades that we’ve been bringing recently. It just shows that we need to keep pushing and keep going in this direction. Secondly, on the personal side, I would say it’s been a bit of a tough weekend, even if it doesn’t look like it. “I was trying a lot of experimental things yesterday and that probably made me be a bit on the back foot for today. I was not fully comfortable with the car, but I still managed to more-or-less recover and feel better today. We put in some good laps in quali to reach P6 in front of our rivals, and making it to Q3 with the Medium tyre gives us a good fighting chance for the race. Now we have to finish the job tomorrow!”

“It was a bit of a funny session, as I didn’t get a consistent feel for the car and didn’t extract the maximum out of it, so I can’t be happy with that. On the last lap I just didn’t have the same feeling as during other parts of the session and that’s why we didn’t qualify where we should be. The car was better than where we ended up. On the other hand, I am looking forward to tomorrow. It will be difficult to manage the tyres, but in the race, usually things settle down so it’s much more straightforward and should be more consistent, so let’s see what tomorrow brings.”

“I’m content with eighth place today; we kept up our recent run of Q3 appearances. I felt there wasn’t much more lap time left out there and eighth was probably the maximum. I made a mistake on the first Q2 run, so I aborted that and then put the Medium tyre on. It was a risk as it was the first time we had run it all weekend. But clearly the team knew it was going to pay off as I managed a good lap to get through to Q3. The grid tomorrow is interesting with more or less everyone starting on the Mediums. I’ll target the cars ahead and aim for a good race.”

“It was a difficult qualifying overall. In FP3, we were more competitive with P6 but we made some changes after the session and qualifying was tricky as I struggled with grip. I’m quite disappointed with ninth because I think we clearly had more than that, but that’s where we are and we’ll have to fight tomorrow. We start the race on the soft tyre so we know it’s not going to be easy but the long run pace was ok. We will have to look at the strategy and see what we can do to make these tyres last as long as they can so we can fight our way back and recover some positions. I’ll be pushing flat out.”

„Ich bin ausgesprochen happy, was unsere heutige Leistung betrifft. Das war ein positives Qualifying, und ich freue mich sehr über meine Rückkehr in die Top 10. Mehrere Faktoren ermöglichten dieses Ergebnis: Das neue Update-Paket scheint gut zu funktionieren, und es gelang uns, das Potenzial der Reifen unter diesen Bedingungen optimal zu nutzen. Die Strecke verbesserte sich von Runde zu Runde. Deshalb war es wichtig, in jedem Drittel des Qualifying die jeweils letzte Runde möglichst perfekt zu fahren. Der einzige negative Aspekt: Ich bin einer von insgesamt nur zwei Startern, die auf weichen Reifen ins Rennen gehen werden. Doch wir werden eine Strategie finden, die es uns ermöglicht, in den Punkterängen bleiben zu können. Wir haben eine gute Pace und hoffen, ein gutes Resultat erzielen zu können, was uns so lange Zeit versagt blieb.“

“I had a bit of a slow start to Qualifying as I finished Q1 in P15. I knew the car had a lot more potential and I had a much better lap in Q2, although the wind picked up a bit and I just missed out on Q3. The car was good today – it came down to such fine details which made the difference to make it into the top 10. Obviously, I would have liked to be in Q3, however, starting from P11 is quite good for us because we can choose which tyre we start on for the race. Looking at Friday practice, our long run pace is stronger than our short run, so we’ve got the chance to score some points tomorrow.”

„Die neuen Teile, die wir für dieses Rennen im Gepäck hatten, haben einiges gebracht, und wir waren definitiv konkurrenzfähig genug, um den Sprung in Q3 zu schaffen. Unglücklicherweise unterlief mir während meiner letzten Runde in Q2 ein Fehler, weshalb es mich nicht überraschte, dass ich die Top 10 verpasste. Trotzdem sind wir in einer guten Ausgangsposition fürs Rennen: Ich kann die Reifen frei wählen, und das Auto läuft recht gut. Morgen werden wir herausfinden, was möglich ist.“

“Today was about small margins. We didn’t have a totally smooth Q2, and that’s why we’re outside the top ten. Nothing bad happened, my first lap in Q2 on Mediums was good, but on my second lap, which is supposed to be quicker, I lost the back end into turn eight and that was it. I’ll aim to race hard tomorrow. Our race pace looked good in practice and we’ll aim to keep it clean. There’s potential for points, and we’ll do everything we can to put the car back in the top ten.”

“It has been a difficult weekend up to now and unfortunately we missed out on Q3. We only need a small improvement to start fighting in the top ten so we need to stay positive and continue working in our usual way. I think my qualifying laps were actually quite strong. We pulled everything together at a time when conditions were very difficult and put a good lap together in Q1. But in Q2 the other teams were up to speed and had the edge over us. We did what we could, but realistically I don’t think we had the pace to make the top ten this afternoon. Tomorrow is what counts and we know anything can happen in the race. We need a good start, a strong strategy and good race pace for us to score some points.”

“Qualifying is normally our strong point this season but this hasn’t been the case today. We’ve lacked pace over one lap. As it’s been all year, it’s very disappointing to have a car that we know has good downforce, a well-designed car that should be working, but just isn’t because we can’t make the tires work. We should be able to do better than qualify P15 and P17 with the car we have. It’s confusing but I’m hoping for a good race tomorrow. We’ll give it everything.”

“It’s been a tough weekend up to now. The car’s been difficult to drive – in terms of balance, and we didn’t do much yesterday, so we were always going to start on the backfoot today. We made some progress, but on the other hand we struggled with some other things. It’s difficult to pin-point, sometimes it’s front-end, sometimes it’s rear-end. It just wasn’t good enough. We just need to analyze everything, get our heads down, and move forward.”

“I’m quite disappointed with that. I felt like I did a good lap with the grip that was available under me, but that’s pretty much where we have been throughout practice. Definitely a frustrating day, but my sights are set on tomorrow. We always look stronger with our race pace and I will give it my all on Sunday.”

The laptimes were not great but driving wise I was quite happy. There was a big track evolution at the end of Q1, the track is rubbering quite a lot which is at least helping to enjoy the driving. If you don’t look at the laptimes it doesn’t feel bad to drive, but when you lack performance and general grip then the laptimes reflect this.

“I’m happy with how my Qualifying went today, it was fun to get a good lap out of my run in Q1. We knew that my race was compromised coming into the weekend due to the penalty, so we focussed primarily on the race setup and put in the most laps we could to be in good shape for Sunday. We can look at this as an opportunity and I hope the hard work we’ve put in for the race will pay off. I’ve had good races from the back of the grid in the past, so tomorrow I’ll try to do the same!”

We maximised today’s qualifying session. This weekend I have only completed a third of the laps as I missed FP1 and FP3, so to put a good lap on the board was pleasing. Overall, I am satisfied with my performance and let’s hope for a good race.