24/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Lando Norris: "Tough day but I think it was what we expected. It was a long race and we struggled a little bit with the degradation of the tyre but also just with the pure pace. We weren't as quick as we needed to be, so yeah, just tough but I won't say disappointed. It's sort of what we were expecting, so not a surprise. The upgrades did bring rmance and we will work over the next event to make sure they're fully optimised. We'll keep pushing, keep trying to improve, and we'll go again next weekend. Thanks again to all the team here and at the factory for their efforts."
Daniel Ricciardo: "It's points so that's a positive. It's only ninth but still important. I had a bit of pace early in the stint and tried to get more out of it, but then it fell away a little too quickly so I definitely struggled from mid-stint onwards and didn't have the pace to run with the Alpines and Lando. I felt like I did the best that I could - but it's not enough to make me happy. Thanks again to everyone for the hard work in getting the upgrades to track this weekend and we'll push to get more out of them over the next few races. Double-points but we'll keep working."
Andreas Seidl, Team Principal: "P7 and P9 maximised what we had in our hands today. Alpine were a little quicker over a race distance but Lando and Daniel both drove very good races and we go away from Le Castellet with a lot of positives. The upgrade package we introduced here gave us a step forward in terms of performance. Big thank you to the development and production teams back at the factory for providing us with enough parts to run the upgrade on both cars, and also to the trackside team and our colleagues at Mercedes HPP who worked very hard in tough conditions to ensure we could get both cars home and in the points.
"We have a lot of data to analyse within the next few days, to see how we can extract more performance from our updated MCL36, before we get back on track, five days from now at the Hungaroring. One more big effort before the summer break."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Le Castellet here.