Fernando Alonso: "I am satisfied with sixth position on the grid for Sunday after we lost a little bit of performance today with a DRS issue.

It's a long weekend ahead of us and there are plenty of opportunities with this new format, so hopefully we can make up some positions and perform well tomorrow in the Sprint. It's very close between a number of teams, so we'll need to try and be more consistent throughout the rest of the weekend. It's exciting to know we are waking up tomorrow and jumping straight into the car for another qualifying session."

Lance Stroll: "It was close out there today; the car felt good and I had the confidence to push hard which is a huge benefit around a circuit like this. Unfortunately, we were having intermittent DRS issues throughout the session and I completely lost DRS on the pit straight during Q3. It cost us a fair bit of time but we'll be doing our best to solve the issue before running tomorrow. I enjoyed the new format today; it was exciting to go straight into qualifying and it makes for a more interesting Friday. We know it'll be a challenge to do it all again first thing tomorrow morning without running beforehand, but I'm looking forward to it."

Mike Krack, Team Principal: "Both Fernando and Lance did well under challenging circumstances today. The single practice session was quite straightforward, but going into qualifying we experienced an ongoing DRS issue across both cars, which meant it was only working intermittently. Despite this costing us some performance, we progressed to Q3 quite comfortably and the team and drivers did a good job of managing a busy session with the yellow and red flags. We had the potential to be a bit higher up the grid, but I think we are well placed to fight for points on Sunday and this is a circuit where overtaking is possible. Our attention now turns to Saturday and maximising the standalone Sprint event to pick up as many points as we can."

Check out our Friday gallery from Baku here.