26/08/2017
NEWS STORY
Carlos Sainz: "I'm a bit disappointed with ending up P14 in today's qualifying because we've had a good weekend up until now; I've been on it since FP1, always in the top ten and doing very good laps. Today's qualifying was more of the same … we were starting to think a top ten qualifying was possible here, but when you see yourself only P14, it's quite frustrating. I think I extracted the maximum out of the car so we just need to keep pushing. We will see what we're capable of doing tomorrow - it's been a good weekend so far, so there's no reason to think we can't go forward! - and hopefully we can fish some points!
Daniil Kvyat: "I haven't driven much this weekend, so it's not been easy - in this morning's FP3 we had an issue with the PU and I have to say the guys did a great job to get the engine changed in time for Quali! I tried to do the best lap I could but I wasn't feeling totally comfortable and we were only able to end up P17… I haven't even done a single long-run, so it's difficult to say what to expect for tomorrow. We also have a grid penalty so we will be starting from the back, but we will try our best and see where we end up."
James Key (Technical Director): "Today hasn't been the day we were looking for, we were more comfortable with our progress on Friday and generally ok this morning in FP3, at least with Carlos. We found the issues that stopped Daniil from running yesterday and had them corrected overnight only to have an engine failure just a few laps into the FP3 session. So, sadly for him, he's had no real reference points at all this weekend, no long-runs on the softer tryes or shorter runs on the Ultra Soft tyre prior to qualifying, so his weekend has been thoroughly compromised and the team apologizes to him for that. Of course, we'll try and do our best for him tomorrow from where we start after the penalty for the 5th PU. I'd like to thank all the mechanics, who so quickly changed Daniil's engine between the end of FP3 and the start of qualifying, enabling us to get the car out and cover two runs in Q1. It was an absolutely fantastic job and, as always, we know we can rely on them to turn it around when we have an emergency. For Carlos, we had a similar balance on the car to yesterday. Generally, it seemed to be okay in FP3 so we went through the programme as planned and got the information we needed from the session. In Quali, we looked okay in Q1 and we were in the top ten at that point, but we didn't make any progress beyond that point, Q1 was our quickest lap of the session and we couldn't seem to find an extra bit of performance for Q2. We will have to look at where we missed something there, but it means that we didn't progress to Q3 as hoped - we needed a few more tenths to do that today. We will now have a look into this and concentrate on what we do tomorrow from grid positions that are a little bit lower than expected and take it from there."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Spa, here.