29/06/2024
NEWS STORY
Daniel Ricciardo: "We knew that it would have been hard to get into the points in the Sprint, but it was important to race and learn for tomorrow.
"There are some positives from the battles we had this morning and the way the car responded was not too bad. Of course, it's frustrating to miss out on Q3 by just a few milliseconds this afternoon, but at the same time, it's a more positive one as I think we made some progress since yesterday and it's something we have to be proud of. I think we still need to find something a little bit extra for tomorrow but today's qualifying put us in a much better position for the race. It's going to be a longer one with pit stops and tyre differences, so there's no reason to believe we can't be a top ten car tomorrow."
Yuki Tsunoda: "After the Sprint this morning, we still needed to find more performance, but at the same time, we weren't in a bad position. I think there was the pace to make it to Q3 this afternoon, but I wasn't able to put it all together, so it's my bad. The team pushed hard and did a good job because we used all the data we gathered to make the best car out of all the previous sessions. The setup was good, so it's my fault and a big shame. We'll push tomorrow and hopefully finish in the top ten."
Claudio Balestri (Chief Engineer - Vehicle Performance): "For the Sprint, we decided to start on used mediums with both cars and were able to show a good pace, gaining positions with both drivers. Yuki finished P13 and Daniel P15; the difference in pace in comparison to the other competitors seems to be very small. The Sprint offers, as always, a good amount of data to better understand how the car operates with different levels of traffic and looking at this precious data we decided to change the setups on both cars for qualifying. The main target was to improve the balance in the high speed without penalising the low-speed performance. We finished the qualifying session with Yuki in P14 and Daniel in P11, very close to making it to Q3. This proves that the changes we made were in the right direction. Our focus now is on race preparation. Tomorrow will not be easy, but we will still aim for some more points."
Check out our Saturday gallery from the Red Bull Ring here.