Fri quotes: McLaren, Force India, Ferrari, STR

Both Ferrari drivers were off the pace on Friday on a track expected to suit them, while both McLaren-Honda cars were in the top 10.

McLaren

Fernando Alonso: “Our performance today was good; basically in line with what we were expecting around here. We knew that, at this track, we were going to be more competitive than we were at Spa and Monza. We got both cars into the top 10 today, and I hope we can achieve that tomorrow in qualifying and then again in Sunday’s race. We need those points: we’re ninth in the constructors’ championship, so every opportunity we get to score points, we need to grab with both hands.”

Stoffel Vandoorne: “For me, it’s been a very positive Friday, finishing sixth in FP2 despite having never driven around here before. I was discovering this track for the first time during FP1, and I got to grips with it quite quickly today. On paper, it looks like it’s been a particularly good day, but the two Ferraris didn’t appear to have an ideal session and ended FP2 behind us. They probably have something more in hand for tomorrow., but hopefully, we can still translate today’s pace into qualifying tomorrow.”

Force India

Sergio Perez: “I feel very happy with how things have gone today. We had some new parts on the car and everything appears to be working well. It was probably our best Friday of the year in terms of what we learned and the improvement we made with the car. Qualifying is very important here so we need to make the most of tomorrow. There is still room to improve and I think we can be strong in qualifying. I’m enjoying things so far and it’s great fun driving these cars around this circuit.”

Esteban Ocon: “It was a busy day on my side of the garage with lots of different parts to test. The first session was not so easy, but we found a good direction in the evening session so I’m feeling positive overall. The car has improved a lot during the day and we have done lots of homework in preparation for tomorrow.”
 

Ferrari

Sebastian Vettel: “Today was a mixed day and obviously not an ideal one. I lost a little bit of balance and confidence. Today we tried a couple of things and I am not sure they were the right things to do. Now we’ll see what we can do for tomorrow. We need to improve, but I think we have enough time to find the solution. Today we were here to practice and, being Friday, everything we did was for free. Clearly, we are not where we want to be so there’s still a lot of work ahead of us."

Kimi Raikkonen: “Overall it was just a difficult day. It was far from ideal and for sure we were expecting an easier start, but it’s only Friday and tomorrow is another day. We tried some things and not everything made sense in the end, so now we have a lot of work to do. Here is no different from any other race; it is true that the tires are a key point, but first of all you have to make sure you have everything you want and a good set-up. And I’m sure we can improve for tomorrow."

Toro Rosso

Carlos Sainz: "After sitting out in this afternoon's FP1, I obviously had to take my time to get used to driving here in FP2 – I had to do some extra laps at the beginning to make sure I recovered the lost time. I think we still haven't recovered it fully but we have until tomorrow before qualifying to be ready and I'm confident we will get there. For the rest, I'm happy with my performance in today's session. We still need to understand a few things we've introduced on the car for this race a bit better because at the moment we're not 100% sure, but we will work hard overnight to solve this. Bring on tomorrow!"

Daniil Kvyat: "A decent Friday, we did a good job today. Of course, we still have some work to do regarding the car balance and hopefully we will fix this for tomorrow in order to improve our pace a little bit more. A part from that, we can be happy with our start to the weekend, we managed to complete plenty of laps and we now have enough information to make a step forward tomorrow."