07/03/2024
NEWS STORY
Yuki Tsunoda: "Overall, today was a good day. There are still a couple of areas to look into tonight, but the car is feeling ok in terms of balance.
"The data we gathered in both Practice Sessions today is important and will help us find more time for tomorrow. I lost out on Q3 by seven-thousandths of a second last week in Bahrain and that shows it's a very tight field, but this keeps the team and myself motivated and focused. Tonight is about finetuning and putting it together for tomorrow and the race on Saturday. Let's see how we go."
Daniel Ricciardo: "It was an FP2 session of two halves. We were competitive on the first set of the soft compound but instead, I struggled a lot with the second set. The track was getting better, and everyone was improving, but I really struggled to improve my time because I encountered some traffic and didn't feel that bite. The second set was a little bit of a mystery, so there's something to learn from that, but looking at the first set, we don't have to be too discouraged. We'll get back to work tonight and understand how we can put it all together. Looking at tomorrow, it's really hard to predict the outcome because the standing has been very close today. It's such a different circuit compared to Bahrain; the surface and the way the tyres behave are different. It's a great track, so I think qualifying will be a fun session tomorrow."
Alan Permane (Racing Director): "Today was a reasonably good day for us. We ran a slightly different programme from the others because we wanted to run two sets of the soft compound in cooler conditions in the evening in preparation for qualifying tomorrow. While Yuki was P11 at the end of the second session, unfortunately, Daniel had traffic on his quickest lap in FP2 and it prevented him from setting a representative lap time. We did our race preparation work on the soft compound tyres and have got plenty of data to analyse. We'll spend tonight looking through it to make sure we're ready for qualifying tomorrow and the race on Saturday."
Check out our Thursday gallery from Jeddah here.