Courtesy of Red Bull Media Service Team
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing and Scuderia AlphaTauri Tuscan GP quotes.
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing duo Max Verstappen and Alex Albon locked out the second row in Saturday qualifying for Sunday’s Tuscan Grand Prix.
Scuderia AlphaTauri Honda’s Pierre Gasly, who won the Italian GP last week for his first Grand Prix triumph, had to make do with 16th on the grid with Daniil Kvyat 12th.
QUOTES
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing
MAX VERSTAPPEN – 3rd
“As a Team I think we did a very good job the whole weekend and from the start the car was in a good window which meant it was more about fine tuning. We are the closest we have been to Mercedes in qualifying so we can be happy about that and also the gap to the competition behind us is bigger. I have good hopes for the race and it is always difficult to predict whether we can fight for the win but I feel a bit more confident than some other weekends. We have quite decent top speed which I think is good around here and although it won’t be easy to pass at least the last few corners are quite wide and long so you can take a few different lines if you have the pace to follow. Strategy wise as it is a new track we will find out a lot during the race, especially about the tyres as track temperatures are going to be quite high tomorrow. A Mercedes is never easy to overtake but we will give it all we have and I love this track so I’m really looking forward to the race.”
ALEX ALBON – 4th
“It was a good, strong qualifying and driving these cars around this circuit on low fuel is just incredible. It’s crazy and it takes your breath away so I hope we continue with tracks like this in the future. Qualifying fourth is my career best so I’m happy as we are making constant progress. Spa was good, Monza was better and here so far has been another step forward. Obviously, there’s still some time to find but we’re consistently getting better and I think without the yellow flags in the last Q3 run we would have gone even quicker. During the Free Practice sessions, I was lacking a bit of confidence but after we made some changes, the car became more connected and I could start pushing it. Tomorrow, we’ll need to get a good, clean launch as it’s a long run to Turn One and then hopefully we can have a simple, boring race without any dramas.”
CHRISTIAN HORNER – Team Principal
“It’s great to have both drivers up on the second row in qualifying with Max third and Alex fourth and we extracted the most out of the car today. We were just a couple of tenths shy of Mercedes but it was one of the closest sessions this year and hopefully we can race well from there. Alex has had a strong weekend with his best F1 qualifying result to date which will provide him with confidence ahead of the race. We’ve been quick in sector three all weekend so our first opportunity will be on the run down to Turn One and then we will see what we can do from there. It’s going to be interesting to see what affect the warm weather has on strategies and of course there’s no historic data here so you’ve got to be prepared to be reactive. The drivers are really enjoying this circuit, it’s a fast old school track so let’s hope it produces a great race tomorrow.”
Scuderia AlphaTauri Honda
DANIIL KVYAT – 12th
“I had a solid day today as I felt more comfortable with the car in qualifying than in other sessions. My engineers did a good job trying to make the car suit my driving better because yesterday I wasn’t very happy, but today we definitely made a step forward. However, we were missing a couple of tenths, so in the last run since there wasn’t much to lose, I tried to take Turn 7 flat; you try to find time anywhere you can. We start from P12 tomorrow and you can fight from there, the race is new for everyone, so it will be important to capitalise on anything that might happen.”
PIERRE GASLY – 16th
“Today was frustrating as everything was going so well all weekend. The car was good in free practice, and in Quali we pushed the engine a bit more and in my two laps before the finish line, I ran out of energy which cost us more than a tenth. Looking at the gap, we were only missing half a tenth to Q2. It’s clearly not good on such a track to qualify so far behind and it’s a shame because everything before that went great. We just didn’t manage to put things together in Quali and we made small mistakes in the worst possible moment. We need to find a way to recover as we know we are faster than this, so we’ll try to make our way back into the points tomorrow.”
JODY EGGINTON – Technical Director
“A disappointing qualifying session today. We have been much more competitive in the sessions leading up to qualifying, but we didn’t manage to repeat our performance this afternoon and we need to understand what the factors behind this were. There is a lot of work to get through tonight in order to be fully prepared for the race, and today’s result has made it harder than it should have been. However, we feel we have a package to be competitive tomorrow fighting with the cars in the midfield and this is our target.”