Ricciardo and Vergne disappointed with quali
Both Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne were disappointed after qualifying today. While the team had hoped to get a car into Q3, only one made it into Q2. The team will look overnight to see what happened exactly, because it is unclear what was the problem today.
Daniel Ricciardo, STR7-01:
FP3: Best lap 1:37.628, pos. 17th, 14 laps
Q: Best lap: (Q1) 1:36.933, (Q2) 1:36.956, pos. 17th
“P17 is not going to put a smile on my face, as I had expected to do better today. I drove as hard as I could, but that did not produce a good enough lap time. With the package we had, I don’t think I could have got much more out of it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better and then we must look at trying to improve our qualifying performance for the next race. We are not where we want to be, especially as before the weekend, we had expected to be closer to the top ten. At the moment we don’t have the answers to what happened. This weekend, we had a few small updates but we also tried a few drastic measures in a way that required me to drive differently, so either we can make it work in Bahrain or we could go back to something we understand a bit better.”
Jean-Eric Vergne, STR7-03:
FP3: Best lap: 1:37.493, pos. 16th, 13 laps
Q: Best lap: (Q1) 1:37.714, pos. 18th
“I am not feeling good after that. I’m not really sure what happened this afternoon, but we lacked speed. My lap was not exceptional, but nor was it bad, so we have to try and understand why it was so slow. All we can do is try and have a good afternoon tomorrow and then improve the car for the coming races, because what happened this afternoon was simply bizarre. It’s true that I got a good result starting low down the grid in Malaysia, but it would be nice to at least start higher up the order quite soon. I will feel better tomorrow morning and will look forward to seeing what the race might bring.”
Laurent Mekies, Chief Engineer:
“Obviously, this was a disappointing qualifying for us and today we clearly lacked the pace we needed to be in the fight. We now have to look at where we lost this performance. We made quite a few changes to the cars from yesterday and during this morning’s free practice and we must assess where we did not go in the right direction. So far this weekend, we explored a quite different direction in terms of set-up and maybe it cost something in terms of ultimate pace in qualifying. However, it was a job that needed to be done and we must work out how to improve it for tomorrow. However, I believe the situation for the race is still very much open for us to get a reasonable result, as the gaps are in fact relatively small.”
