03/09/2022
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "I'm really happy about our Quali performance today. If I'm honest, it was a bit of a surprise to make it through to Q3, considering our pace in FP3, but we made some good changes to the car after practice, I was then able to put it altogether and extract the maximum performance from the car. The hard work from the team has really paid off this afternoon and making it through to Q3 is really positive, so I'm pleased with how we've improved today. Now we've got to concentrate on the race, we've got a lot of strong data to look through, so we need to work hard tonight to allow us to try and finish in the top 10 tomorrow."
Pierre Gasly: "At the end of the day, considering where we were in the practice sessions, we have to be pleased with our performance today. We've made a big step-up from FP3, and we just missed out on making it through to Q3 this afternoon. For the race tomorrow, the aim is to gain as many places as possible off the line, as we're starting from P11, and then hopefully come home in the points."
Claudio Balestri (Chief Engineer - Vehicle Performance): "After Friday's session we were not really satisfied by our performance as we knew there was margin to improve our package, so for this reason we decided to change the setups overnight. The aim was to try to improve the management of the tyres and the overall performance, we were especially struggling in the corners. In high-speed corners we were sliding and in Sector 1 we were slower than our competitors. This morning, in FP3 we didn't fully solve our main limitations and were not happy with our performance, so we made further changes to our setups before Quali and it paid off. At the end of day, we can be pleased with Yuki starting tomorrow in P9 and Pierre in P11. Now we are looking forward to the race, it will be very important to manage the tyres and to ensure we control the degradation, and if we do this well then hopefully we can fight for points."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Zandvoort here.