Red Bull Racing
Max Verstappen
“It's been a very challenging weekend for us overall. We unfortunately had to retire today in the race due to an ERS cooling issue, which is not what we like to see. We faced the same problems that we had in Melbourne: we had a lot of degradation and were still struggling with the pace and the grip. We tried a different procedure to help with the start, had a similar issue and lost quite a few positions at the beginning, ending up at the back of the grid.
"There are quite a few things we need to go away and analyse and learn from in order to improve our overall performance of the car. It is not where we want to be and something we will be looking at in detail ahead of Japan. The Team are very talented and working on doing everything they can and I have a lot of confidence in them but at the moment we aren’t where we want to be.
"We do have a bit of time after this race to work on the car so hopefully we can work on improvements. Finally, congratulations to Kimi on his first race win: the first one is very emotional and it was only a matter of time that he was going to achieve this."
Isack Hajar
"It's a shame I wasn’t able to score more points today. I had a good start and had decent initial pace in the early laps. I enjoyed the fight with Ollie, it was good to race, but then the rear snapped out so fast and I lost the car. I had to then come through the pack, but I got some good overtakes and managed to work my way into the points. We got a little lucky with some of the cars ahead, but it's still nice to get my first points with the Team.
"At the moment, we're just lacking pure car performance to be competitive with the teams at the front but we're understanding how to improve the car and its balance with each weekend."
Laurent Mekies – Team Principal
"The Chinese Grand Prix proved to be a very tough event for us from Friday onwards. Being on the back foot at the start of a Sprint weekend is the worst possible scenario as there is really little time to catch up and get on top of any difficulties. We knew that just getting onto the grid in Melbourne with our own PU was a major achievement in itself and it would have been naïve not to expect we would encounter reliability issues.
Today, we had to retire Max because of a coolant fault. However, this was not our only issue as overall, performance wise, our package showed some significant shortcomings. However, we have learned so much over the past few weeks and I expect that we can be more competitive from the next round in Japan in a fortnight’s time. After that, the unfortunate but inevitable cancellation of the races in April will give all of us a chance to catch our breath and work as hard as always in Milton Keynes.
We have a great group of talented people on the campus and I have full confidence that we will get through our current limitations thanks to a massive push from everyone, and improve our package rapidly."
