12/11/2017
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "I think it's definitely our best race and best performance since I arrived in Malaysia. It's true that we knew it would be a difficult race starting from P19 with the penalties, but I think in the end it was really positive coming back from 19th on the grid. We knew the start was the key, after watching races from the past few years, if we wanted to have a decent race, so I went on the outside into Turn 1, which worked out pretty well. I overtook maybe three cars at Turn 1 then one at Turn 2, then after all the mess in front of me I stayed flat out and just tried to avoid everyone! In terms of performance, we extracted everything we could. At the beginning of the first stint I was staying quite close to Carlos and then after that I picked up the pace, but we were quite limited with the tyre degradation. In the end I don't think we could have done much better than what we did today."
Brendon Hartley: "It's a shame that I had to retire, but I'm happy with the part of the race I competed in - I had a really good start and that was the first box ticked. I had to get around Stroll because he sort of stalled in front of me, but all the procedures that we've been working on were really good. During the first lap I lost a place to Pierre, which was a bit annoying, but after that I think I drove a pretty good race. I lost radio communication with my engineer for a long time, so that was tricky, especially during the Safety Car restart, trying to remember all the things I had to do! It took me about ten laps to get the radio plugged in again - it was quite difficult to find the hole! I think that we could've finished the race just behind Pierre if we hadn't suffered a high oil consumption... We knew that there was a problem early on in the race, as I had to start transferring oil - I didn't want to ask, but I had the feeling that we were not going to get to the end and we didn't. Hopefully we can have a better race next time out in Abu Dhabi and close the season on a high!"
Franz Tost (Team Principal): "From the very beginning of the weekend we suffered a lot of problems as we missed the first practice session, and both of our cars had to start from the back of the grid on Sunday due to penalties. The race was quite positive for us as Pierre closed the gap to the cars in front and showed a good performance. Unfortunately, we had to call in Brendon because of a high oil consumption which we need to investigate and which unfortunately didn't enable him to finish the race. Now, we are looking forward to the last race in Abu Dhabi, where we can hopefully successfully defend our sixth position in the Constructors' Championship."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Interlagos, here.