30/03/2019
NEWS STORY
Max Verstappen: "We have been struggling with the balance of the car this weekend, especially with switching on the softest tyre. In qualifying I had a lot of oversteer and the car was sliding when I put the power down, which made it difficult to anticipate what to do in terms of balance and how to approach the corners. My single lap in Q3 was an all or nothing lap and I don't think I left anything on the table. I am of course not happy to be behind Ferrari and Mercedes, but I'm almost pleased to be fifth, because after Q1 and Q2 it looked like we may not be fighting for that. It will be interesting tomorrow and in the race we should be more competitive as our longer runs on the medium tyre have shown good performance so far this weekend."
Pierre Gasly: "For sure it was not an ideal qualifying and since the beginning of the weekend we have struggled, especially with the rear of the car. We already tried to improve it, but I haven't had a good feeling with it, and when it's as tight as today I think we missed out by about six hundredths. It is really important to put everything together but it just didn't happen today. The car has potential so we just need to find the direction to get the best out of it and this is a track where we can recover. We will push tomorrow massively, we want to score points and clearly get a better result than this. I saw that Charles achieved his first pole position today, he deserves this as he was fast all weekend, so congratulations to him."
Christian Horner, Team Principal: "It was a very difficult qualifying for us. We have struggled on the C3 tyre all weekend which both drivers found tough to manage in qualifying. Pierre was unable to progress past Q2 and will start the race form 13th tomorrow. Max managed to extract every ounce of performance from the car on his single run in Q3 to qualify in fifth. We have shown much better pace on the medium compound tyre and hopefully we will be able to make good use of that tomorrow at a track you can certainly overtake on."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Sakhir, here.