Pierre Gasly (AT03-01, Car 10)
Third Practice Session – Best lap: 1:37.290, pos. 10th, 18 laps
Qualifying – Best lap: (Q1) 1:36.577, (Q2) 1:36.740, pos. 13th

“I’d felt happy in the car up until Quali, we’d done a good job in the practice sessions and been in the top 10, there was definitely potential to make it to Q3 today, so that’s why I’m frustrated. I struggled with the brakes and just couldn’t get the temperature into them, so it’s a real shame. Looking to tomorrow, I don’t see why we can’t fight for the points, we will need to capitalise on every opportunity, and I am confident that we can make up ground tomorrow.”

Yuki Tsunoda (AT03-03, Car 22)
Third Practice Session – Best lap: 1:37.888, pos. 16th, 19 laps
Qualifying – Best lap: (Q1) 1:36.808, (Q2) 1:37.147, pos. 15th

“I’m frustrated with our performance in Quali today. Of course, I exceeded track limits on my last lap, but I don’t think it made that much of a difference, we didn’t have the pace to get through to Q3. We’ll go away tonight and see what more we can extract from the car. I’ll push as much as possible in the race to try and aim for a points finish.”

Jody Egginton (Technical Director)

“The setup changes we made overnight were not excessive, as the Friday balance was ballpark and FP3 car balance was pretty much as expected with no major issues. This meant our changes ahead of Qualifying were limited to the normal fine tuning of tools and some minor aero related optimisation. Going into Qualifying, we expected that there would be a very tight midfield battle to fight for a Q3 place, and indeed this is what we saw. We navigated Q1 without any fuss whilst Q2 was less straight forward, as Pierre struggled with his front brakes and Yuki reported that his car balance was a bit too much toward understeer on his last set. He then also exceeded track limits at Turn 9, although this in itself did not prevent him making the cut for Q3. Overall, I feel we have maybe not extracted the most from our package in Qualifying and we will go through the data to understand why and what we could have done better. Our focus now shifts to the race, with the objective being to get our cars moving forward into points scoring positions.”