23/06/2018
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "I think Q3 was a bit of a longshot today, I really hoped we would be able to make it but unfortunately we just didn't have the pace. I was really close with Sergio, so maybe one more position was possible, but we lacked performance in qualifying. Of course it's a bit disappointing not to get a better result in my home race, but I think we did the best we could. We seemed to have some trouble with the second sector on the long straights, so we need to have a look at the data and see where we're losing time, because in general the car feels OK. I think yesterday it felt a bit better than today, but it's so tight in the midfield and we lacked a couple of tenths. It's been really amazing to drive in front of my home crowd, they give me a lot of support! We have one more battle tomorrow - the most important one - and hopefully there will be a lot of fans there to give me a boost. I'll fight a lot and try everything to get back in the points, the last time was in Monaco and it would be amazing to score points in France!"
Brendon Hartley: "We're starting tomorrow's race from the back of the grid because of the engine penalty we received, but we're pretty positive because the car's felt decent all weekend - especially on the long run simulation yesterday. Qualifying started pretty well for me, I think I was in the top 10 after the first run, then on the second one I ran into a bit of traffic. It also started to rain a bit towards the end of the lap, so it didn't feel like we got everything together. If the weather is as unpredictable as today, there might be some opportunities tomorrow."
Guillaume Dezoteux (Head of Vehicle Performance): "Everybody got caught by the rapid change of conditions at the start of FP3, but we still managed to get half a dry lap with Pierre. Brendon instead had to go for an installation lap following his PU change, so it means he did not complete a timed lap on dry tyres. The rest of the session was compromised by the rain as we had to save the wet and intermediate tyres in case of a wet qualifying session. Qualifying was very disappointing as we were expecting more from the pace shown yesterday. The changeable conditions made the session quite difficult, especially at the start of Q2. Brendon's lap in Q1 wasn't enough to make it to the next session by only 0.2s and he was improving up to T14 so it was very close. For Pierre, he was able to put a strong lap together at the end of Q1 but we have never been in a position to improve in Q2. He suffered from an excessive amount of understeer in the last run and was not able to extract more from the car. We will analyse all the data to understand what were the main players in that issue. For the race tomorrow, we are flexible with the tyre choice so we will evaluate all the scenarios and hopefully come up with some interesting proposals, for Pierre starting P14 and Brendon from the back of the grid."
Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director): "It was unfortunate that we were unable to do any meaningful running in P3 because of the rain so we made our settings choices based on yesterday's data. The actual result of qualifying is a bit disappointing, with Brendon not getting further than Q1, while Pierre could only manage 14th on the grid for his home race. For tomorrow, it would be good to start this run of races on three consecutive weekends with some points, which is still a possibility from 14th on the grid."
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