Fahrerstimmen – Tag 2

Pole position is an amazing feeling! I feel so grateful because the Team have worked so hard. We've been pushing so much over this time so to finally get pole position is great; it feels just like the first time. I didn't expect that we’d be fighting for P1 coming here today. When I started my final lap, I gave it absolutely everything. There was nothing left in it.

There’s been plenty of ups and downs over the past 18 months. It's been a roller-coaster ride, but none of us have lost faith. We've all just hauled together and stayed united. We're focusing on trying to steer the car in the right direction. It has been tough, and will continue to be so at times, but I think this shows that we're on the right track and we can do it if we keep pushing. I have to try and sleep tonight now! Tomorrow, we’ll bring our A-game as a Team. It's going to be difficult to fight Max and Lando but let’s see what we can do.

We have not performed the way we should be performing all weekend, it has been really difficult to get the most out of the car. I was struggling with putting the balance together, front to rear. We tried a lot of different things in terms of set-up but it didn’t really work. When you are struggling in qualifying you can only try one or two things and then when you really push you fall out of the window again. My second lap in Q3 I tried to push a bit more and the car wasn’t there. I think our upgrades worked but that didn’t really show. The balance I had in qualifying won’t necessarily be a bad thing for tomorrow. Everything in the race is a lot calmer and more stable, whereas in qualifying you really push it to the limit on the balance and can feel more issues. Our long run looks competitive so that is positive. It is still going to be tough to get in front but if we are better on tyres then I predict a good race. Nothing is lost, we have a good race car and it will be a good battle with them tomorrow.

If you’re doing within a tenth of pole, it feels like you should be on pole if you put the lap together, but I guess as an overall picture, the team did a good job: P3 and P4 for both of us.  
So, a good weekend so far but, as a driver, I’m not the happiest. I feel like I made too many mistakes here and there and that cost me today. There are always little things. Just putting the lap together. It wasn’t the cleanest. I guess there’s always an element of risk involved in trying to push it a little bit more – but nothing major. P3 is still a good position for tomorrow. So, still a good day.   
I’m excited. I think the race pace yesterday was pretty strong. Just as strong as we were at Silverstone, so I’m excited. It’s just a difficult track to overtake – which is probably why I’m a bit more frustrated than I normally would be – but I’m up there with the good guys. We’ve got two cars up there, so hopefully we can use them and get some good points tomorrow.   
We did a good job today. Tonight, we focus for tomorrow.

P4, so I’m happy to be at the front, definitely. I think in Q3 it wasn’t my best performance, but it was enough to be on the second row. So, we’ll see what we can do tomorrow. It’s been a very encouraging day for the team, to still be at the front at a very different circuit. So, full credit to the team in giving us these opportunities. I’ll try to make sure I’m a little bit more polished next time, but it’s still a nice place to be, in P4.

It feels good, very good, to be lining up on the grid in fifth place tomorrow. I felt comfortable from the first lap onwards, but still, I did not really expect to even finish Q1 in P1. My first run was quite rough, but then we subsequently managed to execute at the top of our performances up to the end of Q3. I am very happy with the job done today, I knew I had to do a big step in my final push lap since my previous one had gotten deleted, and we did it, all together. Overall, I would say this track layout suits our car well, which gives us great motivation ahead of tomorrow’s race. The team did an amazing job, and I am glad we got both cars into the top ten: we were not happy with the performance we extracted from the new package after Silverstone, but we all worked hard in order to further optimise it, and these results prove it. We were already looking quite strong yesterday, and after having further analysed the data overnight, we found that extra push that allowed us to get through Q2 and Q3. Now, all of our focus will go into keeping up with this performance tomorrow, when it matters: hopefully, we’ll be able to end the weekend as we started it, and add new points to our tally.

Although I am happy with my lap, we just weren’t fast enough. Our car is quite sensitive to wind and that also affected the outcome.
It’s difficult to say who our main competitors will be tomorrow, because, as we have seen this season, the pecking order is changing all the time. We know what our weak spots are and will work hard to improve them. 
Tyre management is key on this track, if we manage that well we can have a good race.

I am really proud of the whole team today, and positively surprised about how good our performances have been: we saw that we had realistic chances to get into the top ten, but fifth and seventh went even beyond our expectations. We have been strong throughout the whole qualifying session, with all the compounds, and managed to extract the full potential from our cars: the track layout seems to suit us and allowed us to get the most out of our package. Of course, the work is only halfway done, and points will be awarded tomorrow: still, overtaking is not easy here, and that should help our cause with the positions we locked in today. The results we brought home today are a good reward for the team both trackside and back home in Hinwil, for the job done in the recent weeks.

I was happy with the AMR23 today in Qualifying after we made some tweaks to the set-up from yesterday. The average time for us to pole position has been four to five tenths [of a second] this season, so if you look at our result today, it was a normal Qualifying. The pack is so close, so a tenth here or there makes a huge difference in deciding the final positions. I think our performance is better than our result suggests. Looking ahead to the race we know it’s difficult to overtake here, so I think it will be tough tomorrow. We will try to extract the maximum and target the top six positions to score as many points as possible.

Today was such a tight battle that was dominated by the compounds and the new tyre format. You don’t get many learnings on the tyres so we don’t have too much information from them for this weekend. In Q3, I had a poor sector one on the last lap which set us back, however, we have had a solid day and are focusing all our efforts on tomorrow. I believe we can be competitive and aim to finish on the podium as we have a good race car and a strong race pace. The track here is harder to overtake on but I am confident we will have a good performance: everything is to play for on race day.

Happy! All laps were clean and we extracted everything we could out of it. In Q3, unfortunately we were only tenth as we didn’t have any more pace. I was a bit concerned in Q1 with the hard tire going into qualifying, I wasn’t sure what to expect there, but we managed to survive that. Q2 on the medium was pretty good, and then in Q3 there just wasn’t enough pace, but every Q3 for us is positive.

I’m not happy to miss out on Q3 for the first time this year by only two thousands. I haven’t been comfortable with the Medium compound all weekend and I paid the price today, in the tightest qualifying of the season so far.
It won’t be easy tomorrow with the traffic and the high degradation, but we’ll try everything to overtake and gain positions to bring home some good points.

It’s a disappointing feeling not to reach Q3. All teams expected some challenges with the new Qualifying format on Hards and Mediums in Q1 and Q2 and that certainly proved to be the case. We’ve been at our best on the Soft compound this weekend, so it’s a pity we could not reach Q3 and see where we could have ended up. There are many things we must review but right now, we will focus on tomorrow’s race and working our way back into the points. We will need a good start, a good strategy and I’m confident we can secure some points as a team.

The main thing is for me to get behind the wheel, feel good again and be comfortable in the car and the team. I feel like I’ve made good progress over the past two days and learnt relatively quickly, and as long as we keep progressing from here, I’ll be happy. It hasn’t been the easiest weekend to come in, with the wet conditions we had yesterday and the different tyre allocations, but I was happy to be competitive in qualifying. I don’t expect the racing to feel too foreign, I only took half a year off, so tomorrow will be fun, and of course, if there are gaps, I’ll see what the car can do.

It was frustrating to have had my first Q2 lap deleted due to track limits at Turn 12; I was just pushing hard and it’s difficult to know where the line is as you can’t feel it. The new Qualifying format did make things slightly more challenging, but I don’t mind that, and it’s the same for all of the drivers. It’s an incredibly tight pack with fine margins between all of the teams, so going into tomorrow we’ll be looking to make the most of any opportunities that come our way.

It’s been a frustrating day for the whole team and it’s always a bitter feeling not to be in the final part of Qualifying. The qualifying system today is the same for everybody but we seemed to struggle on the harder compounds especially on warm-up and getting the tyres into a window at the beginning of the lap. In plain terms, we were simply not fast enough today. We have to keep our heads down, keep working hard and find ways to make our package quicker. This weekend is not over until the chequered flag drops tomorrow afternoon. We will see what we can do on strategy to make up some places and I’ll give it my all on track.

If you look at Qualifying, it wasn’t a bad session as we were right in the mix - one tenth would have moved us up a few places. It’s frustrating to be so close to Q2 but it’s a bit more representative of our overall pace. It shows we’re making progress but it’s also good to come to tracks like this as it helps us to understand our car and highlight the issues. Even the tyre compounds went against us I believe as the harder tyres have less grip, so soft tyres tend to hide our problems, whilst hard tyres expose us more. It was always going to be tricky but, ultimately, I believe the Alternative Tyre Allocation penalises us more than the top teams who can save on tyres and be better prepared for Sunday.

Today was difficult. Being knocked out of Q1 isn’t great; it’s tough and I’m disappointed. I couldn’t improve and missed out on Q2, not finishing in the position I wanted to, and it’s a shame. The pace was there, and I feel we have made a step forward with the new rear wing, I just couldn’t put it together and maximise my performance. It's good learning for the future, but I’m very frustrated I lost the opportunity to maximise my pace. The different tyre allocation we had for qualifying this week was fun yet challenging, because it made the practice sessions more difficult, but it doesn’t affect the race tomorrow. From what we saw in practice, the race pace seems ok, so hopefully I can maximise on that and gain as many positions as possible.

Today we were fast, and the car felt great. Unfortunately, we were out of sync with everybody else for the whole session. We have a great Team around us but the whole session just wasn’t good enough for our standards. There was a lot of traffic at the end of the final sector, and the lap was gone when I was three tenths down by turn one. The Hard tyre works well here, especially with the high temperatures, but we were just on track at the wrong time.

It’s disappointing as the car was more than quick enough to get through. When you don’t get things right you get punished and we’ve been punished for sure today. Lewis did an amazing job though so congratulations to him. Tomorrow will be extremely hard, but we’ll be fighting and I’m going to try to come back through. Even though it’s a tough track to overtake, I’ll do my best tomorrow.

Just a disappointing qualifying for me, I couldn’t find the pace in one lap this week. I think I just can’t seem to find the confidence in the car on one lap – on long runs and high fuel in the race it’s a different story. Seeing what’s in the car, Nico doing Q3, it’s of course disappointing not to be able to extract that myself. I feel more confident in the race but then again we as a team have a limitation there too. The tire allocation made no difference for me, it’s the same for everybody. We’ll just try again tomorrow and see if we can pull something out of the hat.

I think if everything had gone perfect, we had a chance to go to Q2 today, but it was a messy lap. It was difficult going straight to Qualifying on the hard tyre as neither of us had driven it yet this weekend [due to the Alternative Tyre Allocation format of the race] and it wasn’t easy to put a lap together. Although I’m sure everyone struggled and had time to find today, I’m mainly frustrated with myself; I’ve been driving well all weekend, I feel like we had the pace to do something good and I could pick out at least half a second on that lap that was left out there. With the tyre format this weekend, we’ve been so limited on laps. Strategy-wise tomorrow, we’ll be fine as we saved a set of hard tyres. A few people have used all their sets, which I don’t think will feel good for them tomorrow, but from our side we have the tyres we need for the race so hopefully that will play into our hands.