16/09/2018
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "It was a bit of a strange race today. I had a good start, recovered three positions and was P12 after the first lap. We gambled with the tyres and started with the Hypersoft, but in the end it was much more difficult than we thought and I really struggled to make them last at the end of the stint. After the first pit stop, I was in the mess with Sirotkin and Grosjean, and with all of the blue flags I lost quite a bit of time. I tried to do the maximum inside of the car, but I didn't have the pace to fight for points all weekend."
Brendon Hartley: "We rolled the dice today and decided to pit early, I was quicker than the guys in front being on the Hypersoft. We changed to the Ultrasoft and a lot of people covered us which put us back in traffic, so it didn't really work out. We decided to do another pit stop and I got stuck behind the Williams and lost a place to Magnussen, there was a couple of good scraps out there but we didn't have the pace for points today. It's disappointing as we had high hopes for Singapore. It was a tough race, we got to the end but there's no celebrations today. We chose to start on the Hypersoft because we knew we potentially had better tyre life than others around us, and we hoped we could make ground on the first lap. It was a bit tricky because Ocon went into the wall, but we were very competitive in the first stint on the Hypersoft. We tried to do something different to move up the field, but it didn't work out."
Franz Tost (Team Principal): "We were quite optimistic arriving in Singapore that we could score some points because we have been quite competitive here in previous years. However, we didn't show the pace required to finish inside the top 10, so we need to analyse why we didn't perform as expected, and what we have to change to increase our performance for the next races. Pierre made a very good start, he was able to gain a couple of positions and he defended well until his pit stop, while Brendon gained a position and avoided the incident at Turn 3. At the beginning we thought we could bring Pierre close to the top 10, but as the race went on the pace was not there which meant we were unable to achieve a points position."
Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director): "We struggled at the start of the weekend, with a lack of pace from FP1 onwards and although we made a small improvement in time for qualifying, it wasn't really enough to be competitive in the mid-field. Again, we saw that improvement in our race pace tonight, but starting so far back it was always going to be very difficult to get into the points on a street circuit where overtaking is very difficult. So, overall a tough and disappointing weekend. Now our attention turns immediately to the next round in Russia."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Singapore, here.