05/12/2020
NEWS STORY
Daniil Kvyat: "I'm very happy with today as it was a great session, I would say it's my best Qualifying of the year. It was very tricky out there with the traffic in the beginning. In Q3 I put in a very tidy lap, kept it clean and cool, and I'm quite proud of myself and how I drove today. As a result, we're starting from a competitive position tomorrow. We have been strong all weekend here, Friday was also very good, and while this morning I wasn't too happy with the car, we changed back to what we knew and it was strong again in Qualifying. It will be important to have a solid race, the traffic and tyre management will be interesting, so we'll do our best dealing with that. Our race pace looks competitive, so hopefully, we can carry the momentum into tomorrow."
Pierre Gasly: "It was a difficult Quali for us today. In Q1 we damaged the floor and from then it was just a messy session. We only just made it into Q3, but it was very difficult because I struggled with the front and had a lot of understeer everywhere. After what we showed in FP3, it's a bit disappointing to only be P9 in the end. We showed strong pace all weekend but considering all the damages to the car, I don't think there was much more we could do today. Overall, I think we have a good package, I'm a bit more worried about not breaking other parts on the car tomorrow as the track is quite aggressive, but as for the rest I'm quite confident that we can have a strong race."
Claudio Balestri (Chief Engineer - Vehicle Performance): "After a good Friday where we showed a strong level of performance on both low and high-fuel runs, during this afternoon's FP3 we focused our attention on Quali preparation, using one set of Base and one set of Option tyres. Similarly to all the other sessions here, traffic was extremely difficult to manage on such a short lap, especially in Q1 when we tried to use one set of Prime. However, we weren't able to set a competitive lap time to see us through to Q2, so we decided to use a new set of Options on both cars at the end of the session. Q2 was a different story, we knew it was going to be difficult, so we decided to use two sets of new Options on both cars at the beginning of the session, which was the right call because once again we were able to make it to Q3 with both cars. We finished today's Qualifying session with Daniil in P6 and Pierre in P9, despite the fact Pierre had some damage on the car. After a good Saturday, we now switch our focus to the race, ready to score points with both cars."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Bahrain, here.