Sat: Red Bull, Lotus, Force India

Daniil Kvyat is okay after a massive shunt in Q3 while Romain Grosjean once again flew the flag for Lotus.

Red Bull
Daniel Ricciardo: “Firstly, the most important thing is that Dany is okay. I haven’t seen a replay; I only saw the car when I passed it but the team was on the radio to let me know he was fine. As for today’s session, in general it went reasonably well. I don’t think seventh shows how happy I was with the car, because I thought we were on for a top five, but we’re still in a good place for tomorrow. We’re also in a good place for tyre wear, so we’ll see what happens. Strategy is open for the race, it’s possible to do one stop but two stops will probably be the trend.”

Daniil Kvyat: “I’ve never rolled a racing car before and they say there’s a first time for everything. I’m feeling more disappointment than pain. I put two wheels on the grass and there was not much run off area at that point so it put me straight into the wall. I was pushing hard after a messy FP3 and this is the consequence of going over the limit. The car looks really bad and I’m sorry for the guys who have already had a tough couple of weeks and now they have even more work to do. Where would I have finished? I don’t know, but it should have been looking better than P10, because the car felt good in the fast sections, even though we lack the speed in a straight line. Tomorrow, we will try our best as usual.”

Lotus
Romain Grosjean: “I didn’t expect to go into Q3, we thought we were half a second off so this was a great job from everyone! I had a really good lap for Q3. I didn’t get to do my second run, but the main thing is that Daniil is okay and out of the car. For the race, we’ll certainly aim to keep the starting position and score some points.”

Pastor Maldonado: “I was hoping to get into Q3 and although things were quite close, we didn’t make it. We were still working on getting the best out of the medium compound tyres from this morning and we improved a little bit this afternoon, but not enough. Hopefully the strategy, combined with saving new tyres for tomorrow, should work and we can recover a few places in the race.”

Force India
Sergio Perez: “Starting from ninth place is not too bad all things considered and we can race well from there. It’s a shame I couldn’t complete my lap in Q3, but the main thing is that Daniil [Kvyat] is okay. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to set a time I could have been ahead of Romain [Grosjean], but hopefully I can get ahead of him at the start tomorrow because I think Lotus will be our main competition. It’s going to be a tough race because there are some quick cars ahead of us, but you never know what can happen here and we still need to see what happens with the weather. Tyre management is always important in this race and with the wet Friday there are still some question marks.”

Nico Hulkenberg: “Of course it’s disappointing to miss out on Q3 by such a small margin, but I can’t complain too much about our performance today. I think my qualifying lap was pretty good and I felt I was pushing the car to its limit: unfortunately that wasn’t enough, but I know it was our best effort. It’s difficult to know what we can expect in tomorrow’s race: the midfield battle is very tight and everyone around me will make it really hard for me to get back into the points. I had hoped to qualify a bit higher to offset my penalty, especially as this is not the easiest place to overtake. It will be interesting to see how the lack of running from yesterday will affect others: we managed to do a good job with our set-up this morning, but there are plenty of unknowns about the long run pace.”