Audi
Nico Hulkenberg, P12
"It was a difficult race to make much progress. We tried to create an advantage by extending the first stint, but with the amount of traffic and cars coming through to lap us, it didn’t really play out the way we had hoped. Looking back, maybe an earlier stop would have opened up a few more opportunities, but that’s easy to say afterwards.
"The positive is that our race pace was quite good. We were able to match, and at times even be a little quicker than, the cars around us, but starting further back made it difficult to convert that into a result.
"We’ll take the learnings into Silverstone. It’s a very different circuit and one I always enjoy, so hopefully we can put ourselves in a stronger position next weekend."
Gabriel Bortoleto, P11
"I think we did the best we could today. I overtook the Alpine ahead of me, and we had really decent pace for most of the race, but I just couldn't make it into the points as the VCARBs were just faster than us this weekend. It was a very clean race as well, so there wasn't really any chaos or retirements ahead to take advantage of unlike in the last few races.
“Overall, we maximised everything we had this weekend. Our pace in qualifying was good, and the package we brought here worked as we expected. We just need to catch up a little bit to those ahead of us, and we'll do our best to get there – starting with Silverstone next week."
Allan McNish, Racing Director
“Overall, this weekend represents another important step forward for us as a team. I think we maximised the performance of the car across both qualifying and the race, and Nico and Gabi extracted everything that was available from our package.
“Around this circuit we simply didn't quite have the qualifying performance to get ahead of the VCARBs yesterday, with the track characteristics not playing particularly well to our strengths at the moment, and today we couldn't close that gap any further. That said, from an operational perspective it was an excellent weekend. The drivers, engineers and mechanics all executed well, the pit stops were strong, and everything worked exactly as we wanted it to.
“We leave Austria encouraged by the progress we have made and with another solid step in our development. Now the focus shifts to Silverstone, where we will look to continue building on that momentum.”
