McLaren's Carlos Sainz was feeling very pleased with Saturday's qualifying session in Monaco, after making it all the way through to the final top ten pole shoot-out round for only the second time in 2019.
“Very happy with this qualifying and back to Q3!" the Spanish driver said afterwards. “I always enjoy qualifying around these streets."
It was certainly a strong recovery after he had been forced to sit out almost the whole of the first practice session on Thursday morning with a powertrain-related issue.
"After missing the whole of FP1 and a very difficult FP3 where we didn’t get it right on the set-up, finishing P9 today is a great turnaround of the weekend," Sainz said.
"I managed to put together very good laps, improving consistently to finish with that 1m11.4s which I think was the maximum we could extract today.
"Thank you to the team for a good analysis and a perfectly well-executed qualifying in the garage."
Qualifying is uniquely important in Monaco where overtaking on track is all but impossible. But even so, Sainz is not counting his ninth-place chickens before they hatch: "The job is not done quite yet," he cautioned.
Sainz' rookie team mate Lando Norris didn't manage to join him in the Q3 round, but he was close - and will start just three places behind Sainz on the grid. As a bonus he'll enjoy a free choice of tyres on which to start the race.
“Overall I think it was a decent quali considering it was my first time here in Monaco in F1," suggested the 19-year-old.
"I struggled in FP3, perhaps we went in slightly the wrong direction, so went back to what we had on Thursday. It was a little bit of an unknown in terms of how the car was going to change but I had an idea from Thursday.
“I made a small mistake in turn 1 on my final push lap which effectively cost me going in to Q3. I didn’t do it when it counted and that was my mistake. We made good improvements and maybe I wasn’t as confident compared to at some other tracks."
McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl agreed with his drivers that the team had gone in the wrong direction in changes made between FP2 and FP3, and was pleased by how the team had reacted so swiftly before qualifying.
"Well done to the team and our drivers for recovering well," he said. "With the changes we made to our cars from FP2 to FP3, we somehow lost ground to our rivals in terms of pace.
"Both drivers struggled with grip and traction and weren’t happy with the balance of the car.
"The engineers did a great job staying calm, reverting back to settings from Thursday and adjusting the car to the different track conditions for quali.
"The car gave our two drivers a lot more confidence in quali and allowed them to push throughout, ending up in P9 and P12.
"We now switch our focus to preparing for the race. We had good long-run pace in FP2, which should allow us to fight for good points tomorrow.”
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