Fahrerstimmen – Tag 2

Qualifying in these conditions on new tarmac can be quite tricky but that last lap was very enjoyable. It’s all about putting in good laps and staying out of trouble. We’ve had wet conditions at the last few races but it’s the first time here in Zandvoort, the wind and drying track played a big factor in Q3 and turn one on my final lap was a bit tricky, but the Team made all the right calls today. The pressure's always there to perform in front of your home crowd but when you can pull it off it feels incredible. To be on pole here feels great and we have a very strong car for tomorrow, let's see what we can do.

P2 was a good result in these conditions. Every now and again you hope Max makes a mistake and he doesn’t. Frustrating in a little way but I’m very happy! The team’s done a good job. It was a chaotic qualifying but another P2, so a good start to being back in the car.  

The first half of the lap was mega, the second half was probably one of the worst second halves of a lap that I’ve done! I’ve always enjoyed these conditions, it’s when we do well. So, I'll take P2.  
I think there's quite a bit of tyre degradation here and not our forte when it comes into play: we start to struggle quite a bit in certain corners. But we've improved the car quite a bit since Friday, so I want to be a little bit more hopeful. There are opportunities, but it's going to be tough.
We had a tricky Spa, but still finished P7, and we come to a track which we know suits us a bit more and we proved it today again. So, the team has done an excellent job, they've really made a massive step forward from where we were to where we are now. And days like this, when you reward them, is always a good thing. So, we’ll keep pushing. I keep saying we’re not far away, but at the same time, we’re still quite far. So yeah, we'll keep our heads down.

That was a great session and I’m happy to be in P3. Qualifying was a strength earlier in the season, but it’s been going a bit wrong for me recently, so it was good to get the break, come with some fresh ideas and put ourselves in a good place to fight for the podium tomorrow. The final lap was pretty okay – we know that we struggle to get temperature into the tyres when it’s wet or the crossover to slicks, but that also turns into a strength on Sunday. I’m sure Max will enjoy his usual Sunday drive tomorrow, but from P3 hopefully we can have a good fight with Lando, Alex and the rest.

We were good in FP1, FP2, FP3, and of course thought we’d start dropping back down and that we’d hit our sweet spot early, not playing with the car too much since FP1, but this made me feel confident. So, when you add confidence with a track like this which is so narrow and uncompromising, add in mixed conditions, you really need to feel at one with the car, and I have this weekend. We needed a car that was driveable on the limit and fortunately, our car has been all weekend. There’s been a nice headwind through some of the corners, so I definitely think that played a part today and helped us a lot more than normal. We’ve been quite surprised with our high downforce performance this weekend, so hopefully we can deliver on it tomorrow.

It wasn’t an easy Qualifying session today in the wet and the dry, so we have to be happy to qualify fifth for tomorrow’s race. It was very intense and there was a very small margin for error with the narrow track, so it was very challenging. In these types of conditions, you have no idea what happened in the previous seven minutes you were in the garage, so it can be a little bit of a guess, but we did very well today. The upgrades seem to be working well and it has been a great job by everyone in the Campus who have been working flat-out to bring these updates this weekend.

Our performance this weekend hasn’t been great and we knew it was going to be a challenging qualifying. We managed to get through to Q3 and put together some decent laps for P6 but it’s obviously not where we want to be.
Tomorrow it won’t be easy either, but be sure we will do our maximum to defend the position and bring home the best result possible.

It was a challenging qualifying today, with the changeable conditions and amount of red flag time. I definitely wanted to be a lot higher up, especially for the race because it is not an easy track to overtake around. It was very tricky out there, especially towards the end and the strategy we took in Q3 was probably not ideal in hindsight. At the time we thought it was the best to do a double push but I think doing a single timed lap would have been better for the tyre. We just have to look forward now, we have a great race car, we had very strong race pace on Friday and in the simulations so hopefully we are able to make some good progress tomorrow. I want to keep the momentum from before the summer break going, we should be able to really come through the field and deliver the podium.

Eighth in qualifying, a bit of a disappointing end to what was otherwise a good session. It’s a shame to be a bit further back than I’d like, I just think I paid a little bit for not getting the laps in yesterday’s practice sessions, especially when it dried-up today. The car had good pace and felt good which is pleasing so we’ll see what we can do tomorrow and hopefully score some decent points to start the second half of the year.

It has been a difficult weekend so far and we have struggled with our car balance since the first session. We will look into it and try to improve the car to make it more predictable. 
It will be a tough race for us tomorrow, trying to fight our way up to the front. Let’s see what’s possible.

I have mixed emotions and it’s definitely bittersweet. To make Q3 is a huge thing for us. There are so many positives to take; the team and car have been fantastic all weekend and I delivered good laps when they counted in Q1 and Q2 to get there. It felt like we had a good chance going into a dry last session, and Alex proved that with his result, but it’s fine margins in these conditions. I need to look back and see what went wrong, but not dwell on it because our long run pace here has been great. We’ll get the car rebuilt as close as we can and try to score some points. I’ve personally seen progress the entire European leg and I know it is just a matter of time; I’m really close now, starting to understand how to extract the time from the car and that’s what makes today even more painful. I’m disappointed to leave the team with a damaged car but I’ll reset, help the team and we’ll go again tomorrow.

The car was feeling strong today, so it’s frustrating to miss out on Q3 by such fine margins. On reflection, we were just a little early going out for my final run; the track was drying quickly and so the tyres weren’t holding up as well by my second push lap. I think we’re in a good place for tomorrow though. The AMR23 feels competitive, and I was able to push on a challenging circuit, which was good fun. We know the field is incredibly tight here and overtaking can be tough, but if we maximise our opportunities in the race then I think we can score some good points for the team.

I think today could have been better and we’re starting outside the top ten for tomorrow with work to do ahead of us. Conditions were not easy out there on the damp track but still very enjoyable and a good challenge to drive. We will review what we could have done better today as there’s definitely a few small details that did not click, especially in Q2. As a team, we’ll keep working, keep digging and the aim is to score points tomorrow, which I’m sure we can achieve.

It wasn’t my day today. Since FP1, I’ve lost some confidence in the car and that made qualifying tricky. It was tough to get the tyres into the working window, I struggled with the balance and overall grip, and George also did a few different settings that seemed to work better. But we know that the car operates in a narrow window, and these things can happen when you are in that situation. On the final run, I did two consecutive laps and the tyres overheated on the second one, so I couldn’t improve the time. Tomorrow is a new challenge; hopefully the car will be a bit better on full tanks, and we can make some forward progress. This isn’t an easy circuit for doing that – but that will be the goal.

Today’s track conditions were tricky and considering that Liam only had FP3 to drive the car, he definitely did a good job on his first day. As for me, qualifying was frustrating because we couldn’t put it all together. The team did a good job of getting me to Q2, but there’s definitely room for improvement from me, especially with my radio communication to keep updating them about track conditions. I think the car had the pace to get to Q3, so I feel I didn’t maximise my performance, which is the thing that’s the most frustrating, because you always want to feel like you gave it your all. The track conditions were really difficult, and I had traffic in multiple places, but it was the same for everyone on track. It is what it is and it’s learning for the future. It’ll be difficult to overtake tomorrow but the conditions are different again, and we’ll do what we can, obviously aiming for the points.

I feel we converted a solid qualifying and we did what we could. We got the running order right, the whole sequence, which is also easy to get wrong in these kind of conditions, but it wasn’t quite enough in terms of pace. It was a similar picture to yesterday. We’ll approach tomorrow with an open mind, push hard, and try what we can but my expectations are frankly not too high.

Unfortunately, it’s not been a good day for us today. It’s the first time I’ve been out in Q1 this season, so that is very disappointing. On track the conditions were tricky for everyone and on our side, we struggled in many areas, especially with general stability and in high-speed corners. We have some work to do to analyse what happened today and see what we can do to put ourselves in a stronger position in tomorrow’s race. I have started in lower positions before and came back to score points, so that remains the target and we will fight all the way to the end to make our way into the top ten and into the points.

Conditions were trickier than this morning, but I think it was still okay and we had a good chance to make it to Q2. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to maximise our final lap: I had a massive snap in the final corner, where it was wetter, and I just lost out on Q2 by a small margin. Today was not an easy Qualifying session, everybody was fighting to find some space, and it was difficult to get the perfect lap in. Earlier this morning, when the rain was heavier, maybe the car was in a better window. Hopefully tomorrow will be another chaotic day that can give us more opportunities to move forward.

We had been in the top ten in every session so far, so to go out in Q1 is hugely frustrating. I am puzzled, because the feeling in the car was quite similar to FP3, our laps were good, but we are ten places further away from where we were earlier. The conditions on track were tricky but not too dissimilar from earlier in the day, so I have no explanation for this: tyre warmup seems to be the biggest issue, but we need to find some more answers ahead of tomorrow. The race won’t be easy, starting in 19th, but we will give it all: hopefully qualifying was an outlier, and if it’s a wet race, we could get an eventful one and make up some places.

Firstly, I feel for Daniel in this situation, and it’s not something you want to see, especially to someone as nice as him, and I hope he recovers quickly. Any chance you get to race in Formula 1, you will grab with both hands, so I’m very excited about the opportunity I have been given. There are lots of emotions because it’s something I've wanted to do since I was three years old.
Today has been very hectic, with very tricky conditions. It was my first time driving on the intermediate tyres during the first session, and it was different to what I expected, but I felt like I was getting somewhere and learning how the tyres behaved. During qualifying, I was feeling comfortable and like I was gaining a lot, but then it rained again, and I expected the grip to drop, but I was surprised by how high it stayed, so for sure, I didn’t maximise everything. I feel comfortable in the car, but with these conditions, it’s tricky to learn this track in the car.
Physically, I feel ok now, but with wet track conditions, it's not as physically demanding as the dry, so I expect it to be more tough during the race. This track is definitely a tricky one, bumpy in some places and takes confidence, which is difficult for me to pick up so quickly. If it’s dry tomorrow, I’m going to be learning many new things because I haven’t driven the car in fully dry conditions yet and haven’t done any long runs on dry compound tyres. I'll just learn as much as possible and hang on.

I set myself up for it a little bit by damaging the car in FP3 and not getting any wet laps in before qualifying. I tried my best in qualifying but it wasn’t fast enough to get into Q2. We damaged the new front wing in FP3 so unfortunately, we can’t use it for the rest of the weekend and I think it helped, so we’ll just have to try and make do in the race.