Red Bull
Daniel Ricciardo
“To be honest I was hoping for a bit more from qualifying. We knew it was going to be close with Ferrari and we were hoping to get in front of them but they had good pace. It’s a little frustrating as we were losing time down the straights and we need to find out why. I felt like I was doing all I could and I think the lap itself was okay. In the second last lap, I think I found a little bit more in Sector 1 but I felt like it hurt the tyres in the last part of the lap. I’m happy with our long run race pace and should have similar pace to Ferrari, we expect them to be our real rivals in the race. We also expect Mercedes to be conservative and turn down their power in the race, so we’ll see what happens. We’ll gain a position through Sebastian’s penalty, starting P5 is better than P6 and hopefully we have a good battle on our hands.”
Max Verstappen
“Not such a bad result in qualifying but I think the whole team expected a bit better. We wanted to be in front of the Ferraris, we were very close but the balance of our car wasn’t quite right. In the low speed corners where we are usually very strong it didn’t quite work for us today, this could be the changing conditions but I’m not entirely sure. Staring fourth on the grid tomorrow gives us a chance of a good result so we can still be positive. Our race pace looks ok but everyone looks quite strong at the moment so it is quite unknown how tomorrow will play out. It will be hard to overtake here and like you can see from qualifying it is very close, I expect the same during the race. If we can have a good start like in Malaysia then we can achieve a good result. We will all sit down and work through this evening to make sure we are as prepared as possible for the race.”
Christian Horner, team principal
“An extremely tight qualifying where both drivers extracted the maximum from the car. They were very competitive in Sector 1 today, unfortunately we lost a bit of time in Sector 3 on some of the more power dominated areas of the track. Nonetheless, we qualified in fifth and sixth, which will become fourth and fifth tomorrow, and hopefully we can take the good race pace we had in free practice into the grand prix.”
