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Daniel Ricciardo
“It was a tough race. The start felt okay; the medium runners in front of me looked like they were struggling, and we were able to catch them. I was on the hard tyre and tried to use it where I could by going long and finding the pace. After a few laps, we picked up a lot of graining, which got worse and worse over 10 laps, causing us to be a few seconds off the pace. The Team could see some other cars were clearing the graining, however it definitely took us a lot longer. When we did, we were able to come back and have a bit of pace again, but we had lost a lot of ground. I’ve never experienced graining like that, the swing of lap time was up to four seconds. We need to understand why we had more graining for longer. Looking ahead, I love the Marina Bay Street Circuit, so hopefully we can have a stronger weekend there.”
Yuki Tsunoda
“Very frustrated to have this happen two races in a row. A very short race, losing the opportunity to score points, which would still have been tricky, but you never know on these street races. Starting P12 is obviously not ideal and means there are a lot of risks of getting damage. We just need to step up a little bit and qualify in the top 10, so we can get a better start. In terms of what happened on track, it felt like an unnecessary move from him [Stroll]. Sending it in like that, with a nothing-to-lose approach. I’m not sure what he had to gain, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. It was a shame, not the way I wanted to end my race, but we’ll come back strong in Singapore.”
Jody Egginton, technical director
“A very difficult race today and we have a lot of work ahead of us to address the issues faced. Yuki’s race was over before it got going due to contact with Stroll, resulting in damage and a loss of aero performance, which was significant enough to force us to retire him. Daniel’s race started okay with the car appearing reasonably well balanced, but was totally dominated by severe tyre graining, leading to a significant drop off in pace and track position. He got back on the pace, but the damage was done, and it was impossible to recover without the intervention of a safety car, which did not come, so we boxed him late on. It appears we were significantly more effected by graining than other teams, so clearly there is something specific we need to fix ahead of Singapore, which the team back at base and trackside are already very focused on delivering.”
Laurent Mekies, team principal
“This wasn’t the weekend we were hoping for. Yuki was unlucky to be involved in a collision on the first lap, while Daniel’s pace was badly affected by a huge amount of tyre graining, which kept him outside of the battle for the points. It’s something that is extremely unusual and we will need to get to the bottom of it and understand why it affected us so much more than our competitors. In terms of overall performance during the weekend, no doubt that we still have a lot of work to do in front of us. The updates we brought here gave us an improvement in performance which is good news. However, it is not enough to match the progress our competitors have made and get back into the top 10 fight. Everyone in Faenza and Bicester are working hard to improve in every single area and to introduce more developments soon. Let’s see if we can do better starting on the streets of Singapore in a few days’ time.”
