7 March 2023 16:01 (UTC)
"Qualifying went pretty much as planned"
Nürburgring, Saturday 10 October
Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris and Team Principal Andreas Seidl after Qualifying for the Eifel Grand Prix.
FP3 | 1m27.924s (+1.699s) | 29 laps | 13th | |
Q1 | 1m27.378s (Softs) | 14th | ||
Q2 | 1m26.361s (Softs) | 9th | ||
Q3 | 1m26.709s (Softs) | 10th |
“A very challenging Saturday for us – mainly because yesterday we didn’t have the time to test the new package I’m running this weekend. FP3 was not enough to fine-tune the set-up properly and qualifying was a struggle. I did improve through the session, but I haven’t felt like we’ve put the car into its optimal window yet. We need to look carefully into it because the other car seemed to extract a bit more from the other spec, so the target is to optimise the new parts as soon as possible. Hopefully we’ll get there with more running.
“The points are tomorrow and we could have an interesting race due to the weather changes, so we’ll keep an eye on the sky.”
FP3 | 1m27.167s (+ 0.942s) | 29 laps | 6th | |
Q1 | 1m26.829s (Softs) | 4th | ||
Q2 | 1m26.316s (Softs) | 7th | ||
Q3 | 1m26.458s (Softs) | 8th |
“I think today was as good as we could do really. We weren’t quick enough to make further improvement, so I think we maximised our performance – even if P8 is a bit disappointing. The car was feeling relatively good and we have a better feeling than we did in Sochi, which is the main thing. We thought we would have a little bit more in the bag for qualifying, but we didn't. Overall, not a bad day – the car feels relatively good – but tomorrow’s going to be tricky due to the weather, so we’ll see what we can do.”
“Quite a challenging Saturday today after a lack of time on track yesterday to test new parts. The focus of the only free practice session this morning was on giving the drivers as many laps as possible to get used to driving an F1 car on this track for the first time. In parallel, we introduced further aerodynamic updates on Carlos’ car, but with the limited running we weren’t able to optimise them yet. Finding this next step in performance is what we are looking for at the moment.
“Qualifying went pretty much as planned, progressing through the sessions finishing in P8 and P10, which reflects where we are right now in terms of performance and puts us again in a good position to fight for points. With the lack of Friday practice, we didn’t do any long runs here at the Nürburgring which means we go a bit into the unknown tomorrow. Looking forward to another exciting race.”
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