23/04/2022
NEWS STORY
Max Verstappen: "We did well as a team and it is of course a positive day for us. I didn't have the best start so we need to investigate what happened there but after that we had good race pace. Initially for the first 10 laps or so it seemed like the gap to Charles wasn't really growing but then I think at one point the tyre degradation started to kick in a bit more and I could close the gap and I got ahead. Tomorrow is a new day and there are no guarantees, I still expect it to be very close and I the battle tomorrow will be difficult. We are very focused on what is ahead and we hope to do a good job tomorrow."
Sergio Perez: "I am happy with the result of the sprint and looking forward to tomorrow starting from P3. We managed to minimise the damage from quali so I am happy with that, it was a nice save and it was all we needed for today, anything more would have been a bonus. I got a really strong start and after that I was just progressing through the field, it got a bit messy with Daniel when we touched, but overall it was a nice sprint for me and we got some good overtaking done. I think there is some fine tuning we can do for tomorrow and hopefully we are able to do it to be in the mix for the win, which is the target. We certainly have good pace and I am looking to produce another solid weekend for the Team, hopefully we can come out on top against the Ferraris. We have seen in Melbourne and we have seen here already that it can change fairly quickly so either team can turn things around and we certainly expect the Ferraris to be strong. I got really close to Charles today near the end but it was just a sprint so let's what we can do over race distance."
Christian Horner, Team Principal and CEO: "It was a great performance today by both drivers. All credit to Max, he kept his head, stayed patient and kept his position on the tail of Charles, we could see the Ferrari's front tyre was starting to go, and when his opportunity to take back the lead came, he took it. Checo drove well today and made great progress up the grid to take some valuable points and put himself in a better starting place on the grid for tomorrow's race. Max didn't have the best start, but we've got the data from today, so we'll need to make sure we don't make the same mistakes tomorrow. But the good thing is we've now got two cars up at the front of the grid and we'll hope to capitalise on that."
Check out our Sprint gallery from Imola, here.