Practice quotes: Williams, Haas, Sauber

Editor

Haas find themselves amongst the back markers after the first two practice sessions at Monte Carlo.

Williams

Sergey Sirotkin: “I would say today has gone quite well. FP1 was reasonable, FP2 could have been quite a bit better. With the traffic and everything, I didn’t have a clean lap. There was always something compromising my lap, I was not in the right spot or the right window for the tyres. There is room for improvement but it’s good. We’ve seen already position-wise we are better than in Barcelona, but it was not the best of what we could do. I would not say we are very optimistic but it’s looking quite good. It’s challenging but if it was easy anyone would do it. We don’t have the easiest car to drive here. It’s a very demanding car and track but I really enjoy this challenge.”

Lance Stroll: “It was not the best day, but it is the first day, so I am just getting into it and Monaco is one of those places where you need to find the rhythm before you can really execute anything. We have been on the back foot for most of the day and I didn’t really feel I had been on top of the car. However, at least I started to get there towards the end of the session, and especially on high fuel on consecutive laps I felt it was getting better and better. We will be piecing everything together and see on Saturday what we can do. For sure we are far from where we want to be, but there is still a lot of time to think about what we can do before qualifying and the race. We look a little bit better this weekend, and I think Sergey showed the car has a little bit more pace.”

Haas

Kevin Magnussen: “We haven’t been able to find a sweet spot on the car and we haven’t found the grip we wanted to have for around here. Obviously, we’re not very happy with the positions. Hopefully, we’re going to get the tyres to work better, get the grip out of them, and then the performance should rise quite nicely. Right now, we’re not looking like we’d make it to Q3, but it’s about finding the grip on the track. I’m sure the engineers are going to work really hard and get everything in the window with the tyres, the temperature, and make sure we get the grip out of them. If we do so, the car’s been really good everywhere, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t be competitive.”

Romain Grosjean: “Obviously, we’re not where we wanted to be today, in terms of pace, and also in terms of not getting much running in FP1. I’m hoping for a better day on Saturday. We’ve got lots of time to work on the car with having Friday off, at least from driving, and we can think a lot more about the setup. Hopefully, we’ll improve the situation for qualifying. The whole field is very tight, so even though it looks bad position-wise, we don’t have to find that much time to go quite a bit forward.”

Sauber

Charles Leclerc: “It was a productive day for us. It ran quite smoothly overall. We know that this track is going to be a challenge for us, and we have used today’s practice sessions to start setting up our car in the best possible way. We will now look at our data and start working on preparations for tomorrow’s qualifying session. I look forward to being back in the car.”

Marcus Ericsson: “It has been quite a good day. It is important to get in a lot of laps on Thursday in Monaco, so that is a positive for us. We struggled a bit of the hypersoft tyres, but apart from that it was a smooth day. We built up the speed and have a good base to work from for Saturday and Sunday. I look forward to the rest of the weekend.”