Yuki Tsunoda (AT04-04, Car 22)
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:12.714, pos. 13th, 29 laps
Qualifying – Best lap: (Q1) 1:10.837, pos. 16th

“I feel like we didn’t maximise our package today. I didn’t have clean air on the last lap, which affected my lap time. Our pace hasn’t been on it today, so we’ll have to look through what happened and see how we can improve. It’s not an easy weekend because we can’t massively change the setup of the car anymore, so it’s about extracting the performance from the car for tomorrow and Sunday. We’ll do our best to improve as much as possible.”

Daniel Ricciardo (AT04-02, Car 3)
First Practice Session – Best lap: 1:12.778, pos. 14th, 27 laps
Qualifying – Best lap: (Q1) 1:10.843, pos. 17th

“It’s frustrating because we were definitely faster than what we showed, and there was the potential for Q2, and maybe even Q3, but we didn’t get it right on the last lap. I didn’t get the tyres in the right spot for the start of the lap, so I came too hot into Turn 1, and we lost a chunk of time in the first Sector. From then on, the lap started to spiral a little. On the other hand, I’m happy with the improvements I found in the car compared to the morning. I’ll have a look tonight at how we can extract the performance for the remainder of the weekend.”

Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer)

“We didn’t have the most successful Friday in this final Sprint of the season here in Brazil. We explored various setup options during Free Practice 1, focusing mainly on the hard and medium compounds, intending to save the soft tyres for qualifying. We had no major issues or limitations with the car, just the usual low grip to start the session with on a green track. We felt the car was reasonably competitive. It was clear the gaps were tight, as is always the case in Interlagos, so during qualifying, we completed three runs on new soft tyres with Yuki and two runs with Daniel. After the delay to the start of Q1, the rain was very close but missed the track to the north and had no impact. Although we improved on each of the runs, we didn’t have enough pace to make it through to Q2 today, which was frustrating considering the gap was less than one-tenth. We knew we wouldn’t be quite as competitive as we were in Mexico, but we were expecting more than we achieved today. We’ll go through the data, try to understand what happened, and make any changes to the car within Parc Ferme to improve it for the Sprint Shootout tomorrow.”