Feature

Team Talk - Saturday in Monza

Catch up with what all the teams had to say following Saturday qualifying for the 14th race of the 2016 season - the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Ferrari

Sebastian Vettel
"Overall it has been a good weekend so far, putting both cars in the second row. I'm sure we can have a good race from there tomorrow. Hopefully we can take the advantage at the start but we have to wait and see. Once the lights go out we hope we can find a good traction which the tires should give us. It's a long way down to Turn 1 and even if we can try something the race is not one stretch, it's 53 laps around here. To be honest, after I saw the times already in Q1 and in Q2 on a different compound, I knew it would be difficult, but you never know...I was pushing as hard as I could, probably too hard in the first run in Q3 and it wasn't a good lap; fortunately in the end I got it back again. I think overall I'm pretty happy, not so much with the beginning of the lap but I think our race pace is better than the gap in qualifying indicates, so we'll see. We don't mind who's behind us, the important thing is whoever is in front and we still have two cars. The gap is a bit bigger than we would like, but equally the last two races things are coming down a little bit more and things are heading the right way also back in the factory. Even if we don't like it, we need to be a bit patient, I'm sure it will come."

Kimi Raikkonen
"Today we did the best we could and got the most out of the car. For sure we would have been more satisfied with the first row, but this is the maximum we could achieve. We have to be happy with what we did knowing our limits, but obviously our aim is to be higher up. Tomorrow is a different day and if we can make a very strong start we can build our race. Certain teams will start with different tires, time will tell what will happen in the long run, but we felt that starting with the Supersoft compound was the best choice for us. It's going to be a long race, tricky for the tires, and a lot of things can happen; we have to put ourselves up there and if something happens we have to try to maximize our result. We'll try to make the good choice when it comes to pit stops and see how it pans out. Our rivals have been very strong today, but we'll try our best tomorrow and hopefully we have the chance to challenge them."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.

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