MAX VERSTAPPEN, Position: 7th, 1:15.495 (Practice 3 – P6, 1:16.084)
“Obviously we are all disappointed with qualifying. I don’t know why but clearly something is not working compared to last year where we had really good car balance around this track. The weekend so far has been pretty tricky in general, it’s hard to understand why as we have changed a lot of things but it doesn’t seem to have given us a lot more lap time. Around here you really need a stable car which is very hooked in the second sector but we are just not connected balance wise with oversteer and understeer. For the race I need to stay out of trouble at the start as P7 is right in the mix and hopefully we can still score some decent points. As always, I won’t give up on the race result and of course it is not easy to overtake around here but I will still do the best I can with the pace we have, so let’s see where we end up.”
ALEX ALBON, Position: 13th, 1:15.722 (Practice 3 – P12, 1:16.582)
“I don’t have much to say at the moment. It’s massively frustrating and obviously not the result we wanted, so we need to sit down and regroup. I didn’t do a good lap but to be honest a number of things didn’t go as planned today. I felt better with the car in FP3 than qualifying, but still we had traffic on our Q2 runs and so overall it’s been a tough day. It’s not very easy to overtake here so we’ll need some rain in tomorrow’s race to help our chances of moving further up the order.”
CHRISTIAN HORNER, Team Principal
“Today’s qualifying performance was not what we have come to expect as a Team and we simply didn’t have enough speed. There are some unexpected behaviours in the cars and we need to understand the cause of this quickly. Alex had a less than ideal out lap in Q2, with traffic hampering his run, and was unable to put in a time good enough to progress to Q3. Max made it comfortably through to Q3 on the soft tyre but just didn’t have the balance, and therefore the pace to set a time faster than P7. He tried to improve his lap time on a second Q3 run but with only one set of new softs available in that session he was unable to improve on a used set of soft tyres. We now have to work hard as a Team in order to get as much as we can out of the race tomorrow and ensure we have some points on the table and understand the car behaviour we are experiencing this weekend.”