F1 Team Talk - Saturday in Malaysia

Manor

Motor Racing - Formula One World Championship - Malaysian Grand Prix - Qualifying Day - Sepang, Malaysia

Esteban Ocon
“It was really good. I’m pretty happy with everything. The team did a fantastic job to build up a strong car and we can be very proud of our performance today. I got good clean laps and improved with each run, so all good.

“That feels like a long time ago, my first qualifying in Spa. But it got better and better each race and today I felt very comfortable. After all the work that has gone into getting the car working well here, it all just came together. I’m really happy.”

Pascal Wehrlein
“I’m a little disappointed today. This morning was a lot of stop-start trying to fix the electrical problem, so we couldn’t really set the car up. It’s a shame, because at the start of the day I felt we had finally got some things working that we were less happy with yesterday. In qualifying, I had a lot of traffic and couldn’t improve on my second set of tyres. Twice there were cars in front of me in sector 1.

“I think we will be better in the race but we’re starting from a long way back and we have to hope for some opportunities to move through the field.”

Dave Ryan, Racing Director
“We’ve put a lot of work into this weekend and we’ve definitely taken a step forward in a few areas to address some of the issues we’ve faced in recent races. On the face of it, not all of the progress is visible, particularly as we had a problem in FP3 this morning that compromised Pascal’s progress. While he struggled with traffic in qualifying, the actual car performance is better and Esteban had the opportunity to show that a little more. It will be a tough race tomorrow but potentially an interesting one. So we’ll do our best to make sure we’re there to benefit when opportunities present themselves.”