12/05/2018
NEWS STORY
Esteban Ocon: "I am a bit disappointed about our end result because we didn't really have the pace we expected. I was happy with how the car was set up and we can see the updates we brought here are working, but we need a little bit more to close the gap with the front of the pack. I am still feeling positive for tomorrow. We are not too far away from the top ten and our race pace is not bad. We need a good start and then we'll see what we can do. Last year I gained five places from start to finish and I'd be happy to do the same this year."
Sergio Perez: "It was a disappointing qualifying session. Q1 was okay and the car and tyres were working well, but in Q2 we lost so much performance. It's really odd because we used the same strategy as we did in Q1, but the tyres behaved totally differently. We could not switch them on and the car was sliding around, which is why my lap was four tenths slower than Q1. I still hope we can fight back tomorrow and come away with some points."
Otmar Szafnauer: "For various reasons today's qualifying session didn't allow us to deliver the performance we expected. Esteban's session was clean enough, but we were missing a few tenths of performance needed to progress to Q3. Sergio suffered with tyre warm-up issues in Q2 and complained about a lack of grip, which meant he couldn't improve on the time he set in Q1. It's disappointing not to be higher up the grid on this track where grid position is so important, but we will try our best to turn things around in the race. The car looked competitive during the race simulation runs yesterday afternoon so let's see if we can recover some points tomorrow."