4 March 2023 17:45 (UTC)
"The grid has really tightened around us and it’s all to play for tomorrow"
Bahrain International Circuit, Saturday 4 March
Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and Executive Director, Technical, James Key after qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix.
FP3 | 1m33.202s (+0.862s) | 16 laps | 13th |
Q1 | 1m31.652s (Softs) | 15th | |
Q2 | 1m31.381s (Softs) | 11th |
"P11 in the first qualifying of the year, I would say I’m reasonably happy with that. I think we pretty much got everything out of the car. There maybe was a tenth left in it but I needed two tenths to gain any positions. It was a tough qualifying, it was very close between all the midfield and even the top cars, to be honest. It was a little bit better than I was thinking coming into the session, so we’ll take it. It’s a long race ahead tomorrow and a track we can overtake on, so hopefully we can move forward."
FP3 | 1m33.045s (+0.705s) | 12 laps | 9th |
Q1 | 1m32.101s (Softs) | 18th |
"Obviously it’s not what we were looking for there. The red flag compromised us a bit and I just didn’t nail it on the second set of tyres. That said, it was my first F1 qualifying and it is a long season ahead. We’ll do our homework and see what we can do. Tomorrow is another day."
"Today saw a very busy first qualifying session of the season. Q1 was disrupted with a red flag and a scramble at the end of the session, which was a real shame as it left us with a compromised first run, with the tyres not up to temperature, and then a second run filled with traffic. Oscar just missed out, but he’s shown good pace all weekend and we know he can recover from this. He did a very disciplined job in his first qualifying session. Lando did a good job to get through to Q2 and narrowly missed out on the top ten.
"We know we’ve got a bit of performance to find, and we have always said that was going to be the case with this configuration of car, but I have to say it was very, very close today. The grid has really tightened around us and it’s all to play for tomorrow. With decent long-run pace we can make good with both cars and target points tomorrow."
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