13/05/2017
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "We knew it was going to be very tough to get into Q3, but we were close! It's a shame, because I think we had the right balance on the car and I felt comfortable. For tomorrow, I hope we can have a good race. I always try my best and I will do just that once again, in front of my home crowd. I will try and be aggressive at the start in order to gain positions and strategy can always be an important factor here in Spain, so I think we can put on a good show; I'm looking forward to it. I can also count on all the support from the fans to give me that extra boost!"
Daniil Kvyat: "The car was very hard to drive and, to be honest, I think we need to change quite a few things... It was already difficult yesterday and today it just continued - I had absolutely no grip and I just can't handle the car well here. For sure it's quite a disappointing situation, but we just need to keep our heads down and analyse why I'm struggling here in Barcelona - it's strange. Starting last there's nothing to lose tomorrow, so we will just need to go forward and see where we end up after having worked hard overnight."
James Key (Technical Director): "A disappointing qualifying session for us. We had a lot of balance improvement to do from yesterday, with the new parts on the car. I think we achieved a reasonable amount of that today with some changes and a fresh look at some directions we had taken. By the end of FP3 we were generally happy with getting the car dialled into where it needed to be. Unfortunately with Carlos, he was in an extremely tight battle for Q3 and looked good to go into this final part of the session from what we could see, except for the last run in Q2 - we didn't quite get the step we needed to make sure we stayed ahead of the other guys and this left us just outside... When you've got two and a half tenths between P7 and P13, you can really be anywhere within that group, and sadly we were at the wrong end of it. We now need to think how best to approach tomorrow with him to make progress. Regarding Daniil, he's had a troubled weekend and he's never been 100% comfortable with the car. The set-up directions have been similar across both cars, so we need to try and understand this, check the car again and see what's going on that could've affected him so badly in qualifying. We know he and the car are better than last place on the grid! We need to be fighting to try and squeeze through to the top ten with both cars and not be concerned with positions in Q1... However, this is the result today and we need to look into it in more detail. Regarding tomorrow, obviously we'll work hard now to see what options we have and do the best we can from where we are."