31/08/2024
NEWS STORY
Esteban Ocon: "Some positives to take from today, we have made some changes overnight that seemed to have done the trick.
"The car felt better since yesterday and more like our performance pre-Zandvoort. We have not fully understood why, so need to investigate this further. It was always going to be a challenging weekend for us at Monza, but I think the hard work the team has put in overnight paid off and we have made a step in the right direction. Although, we have not put in a fully clean lap so left a bit of performance on the table and maybe even could have moved a few positions up further. Now we need to work on our strategy for tomorrow, to make sure we get it right. It will be interesting to see what will happen as the teams don't have too much representative data on the long runs yet and with the new tarmac there will be some unknowns. We will see how tomorrow goes and we will make sure we put ourselves in a position to fight and hopefully be able to gain positions."
Pierre Gasly: "It was great to reach Q2 in Qualifying today, as it has been very difficult for us this weekend especially on the softer compound tyre. Every time we fitted the Soft tyres this week, we haven't been able to make it work the way we wanted to. The front and rear tyre, the whole grip on the car hasn't felt right. The best lap was with used tyres in Q1. In Q2, we tried many different things to get on top of it but somehow the grip hasn't been there today. That said, we are not far from getting up into the points and look forward to race day tomorrow where we will fight our way up the grid to get up to the top-10."
Julian Rouse, Sporting Director: "Getting both cars into the second part of Qualifying is a good step forward from the practice sessions and a reasonably positive outcome on a track we expected to struggle at a bit more than in recent races heading into the weekend. We knew we would be less competitive here in Qualifying but in the end, it was slightly closer than expected. It's not something we can celebrate and it's not where we want to be but it's also an improvement on last year's result, where we weren't able to get either car out of Q1. We have been consistently more competitive on the longer runs in practice and better on the Medium tyre compared to the Soft compound. With the track being resurfaced there's still some unknowns with tyre life and degradation, this combined which how competitive we look on the Harder compounds means there could be opportunities with strategy during the race to give us a chance of fighting for points. Tomorrow, we'll need to execute everything perfectly if we're to repeat the points finishes in recent races."