McLaren
Fernando Alonso: “I think this is the position we deserved today. Okay, without the yellow flag, we may have been able to manage 11th and 12th, half a second from the top 10, but not better than that.
“This weekend has been very good for me, though, very different from Monza and Spa, I’ve always felt comfortable and competitive here, and tomorrow we’ll start in a good position from which to score points. The race here is quite tough and demanding, on the mechanical side and on the driver’s side. There’s no room for mistakes, so we have to run a perfect race tomorrow and hopefully be in the points.
“Overtaking here is very difficult, so positions are mainly decided by where you start and by your strategy. There are always Safety Cars here, and you need some luck with that too.”
Jenson Button: ”We were always going to have high targets coming here off the back of two difficult races – you’ve got to think positive. But even if we’d got absolutely everything together, it would still have been difficult.
“Even so, 15th isn’t what I’d hoped for, and I’m sure 12th isn’t what Fernando had ideally hoped for either.
“It was a pretty tough qualifying session, all in all. I got understeer when I put new tyres on, and you just can’t put enough front wing on to help that. And then I got the yellow flag at the end of the lap, so I had to lift, which scuppered my chances of doing better. I wouldn’t have got through to Q3, but I would have been a bit higher up.
“So tonight I’ll have a nice chilled evening and look forward to tomorrow. It’s quite an unusual circuit here – you can overtake – so we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
Eric Boullier, racing director: “Well, we got both cars into Q2, which is significantly better than we managed to achieve in Belgium or Italy, but, even so, we’re a little disappointed.
“But for the yellow flag incident towards the end of Q2, which disadvantaged us, we believe we would have been able to bag better grid positions than P12 and P15.
“This isn’t an easy circuit on which to overtake, but tomorrow’s race will be long and hard, and both Fernando and Jenson plan to approach it with the ambition of trying their hardest to score world championship points.”
Yasuhisa Arai, Honda motorsport boss: “From FP1 to FP3, we were on track to setting the car up for a smooth qualifying session. Unfortunately we missed out on Q3 by a slight margin.
“This was especially disappointing as a late yellow flag prevented Fernando from setting his second flying lap time.
“Tomorrow, we’ll likely be fighting in the middle of the pack, so we’ll once again work together with the chassis side to strategise our energy and fuel consumption management for the race.”
