Qualy quotes: Haas, McLaren, Renault, Toro Rosso

Both Haas cars qualified in the top 10 as Fernando Alonso reached Q3 for the first time this season on home soil.

Haas

Kevin Magnussen: “It was a really good qualifying. P7 for us is really pole position – it’s the best you can hope for if you’re not in a Ferrari, Mercedes or Red Bull. I’m really happy with that. I’m looking forward to tomorrow and, hopefully, we can bring home some good points. It’s a good position to start, and again, P7 is probably the best we can hope for if everyone finishes. It’s still a very tight battle, but I think our car is strong, and we can be happy with where we are at the moment. We need to keep up the levels, continue to develop, and keep putting stuff on the car.”

Romain Grosjean: “Pretty good qualifying for the team – both cars in the top-10. Obviously, Q3 could’ve been better and I’m not super happy to start P10 but, in general, I think we’re in a good position for the race and I’m happy for the team.”

McLaren

Fernando Alonso: “Making it into Q3 for the first time this season feels fantastic, and if you combine that with the fact we are at our home grand prix, it’s a double benefit. I’m happy – we were P13 in the last few qualifying sessions, so P8 today is definitely a step forward. The top guys are still too high up so we need to close that gap, but I’m pleased that all the updates we brought here seem to be delivering as we expected. We just need new parts as soon as possible and to keep going in this direction. Every Spanish Grand Prix is special, and there are always a lot of emotions when you go out there and feel all the support. The fans are not giving you extra performance because they can’t push the car, but they can motivate a little bit more so we seem to always perform a little bit better here. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll put on a good show for all the fans. Maybe there’ll be some rain around, and that could be very interesting. Over the winter we’ve learned that a wet track is very slippery here, so we could have a chaotic race and maybe out of any chaos we can benefit.”

Stoffel Vandoorne: “We’ve had the best qualifying session so far this season here, and it was a very close one, again. The tyre selection was not an easy one to decide. The feeling was positive in the car, and we ended up very close to Q3 – Fernando just made it – which shows the parts we’ve brought here are working well. It’s a step in the right direction and we need to keep improving like this in the next races. I think points are possible tomorrow. So far, we’ve done pretty well on a Sunday, as we have a good understanding of the strategy and how to use the tyres. We’ve had good race pace and we need to fight to get ourselves in a good position in order to benefit from other people’s mistakes. Conditions out there have been tricky all weekend with a lot of cars going off, so tomorrow we need to be sharp. We must make sure we don’t make any mistakes, and then I think we can be in a position to benefit and get some points.”

Renault

Carlos Sainz: “It was a good qualifying! We’ve turned things around well since yesterday and the team has done a great job putting a much better and quicker car together. Yesterday we knew making Q3 was going to be very tough, but we worked hard, made changes and improved a lot. Tomorrow I’m confident we can have a strong race; we’re in the top ten and the target is to keep scoring points. We’re starting the race on the Soft tyre with an ideal strategy to hand. I’m looking forward to putting up a good show for my home crowd!”

Nico Hulkenberg: “We had some problems with the fuel system causing the pressure to drop which impacted on power delivery. This was very unexpected and we’ll be looking into why it’s happened. It will make our day tomorrow more difficult as we know overtaking is very tough around here. We’ll have to work out a strategy and hopefully come through it. We’re still aiming to clinch points. We’ll try our best and race hard.”

Toro Rosso

Pierre Gasly: “I’m pretty happy to make it to Q2 and qualify P12. We’ve got some performance back which was important after the last two weekends in China and Baku, so I think there’s positives to take from today. We knew coming here it would be a bit tough because we saw some teams with big updates, but the most important thing for us was to understand our package, and I think we got some good answers. We still need to analyse our performance but overall we’re pretty happy. Things have been working better this weekend, we were in the top 10 twice in FP1 and FP3, and in qualifying we weren’t so far off the pace, so it’s encouraging to see we are coming back into the fight. The race will be long and we know how tyre choice and strategy can make the difference. We will have free choice with the compounds for the start of the race, so I think it’s a good position to be in.”

Brendon Hartley: “It was quite a big impact! We normally run a bit of kerb on the entry to Turn 9, but I took one or two centimetres too much and I just clipped the dirt area which flipped the car around pretty quick. The car was feeling good this morning, I didn’t have a clean run at the end of the session, so the lap time didn’t show the true pace we had. I’ll try and stay positive. I’ll have a good sleep and come back tomorrow fresh, anything is possible. I know the team started from the back of the grid last year and scored points, so that has to be the goal for tomorrow.”