Vettel happy as Ricciardo rues wrong set-up changes
Sebastian Vettel put Red Bull in third to start of tomorrow's Canadian Grand Prix. A great lap in the dying seconds made him out-qualify his team mate, who himself was not all that happy with his own performance.
Sebastian Vettel, 3rd: “The start of the last lap wasn’t great. I still didn’t manage to get that first sector right, I didn’t get along with the first two corners very well today. But, after that I tried to take more risk and it worked, so sector two was very good through the two chicanes, especially through the second one; I found a significantly better line and more time compared to previous runs. I then kept it together until the end, so a very good result. It was the maximum we could do – we were very close with those behind, half a second behind the Mercs, but then four cars were within four to five hundredths of a second of each other, so I’m happy to be the quickest of those. Strategy could be a bit of a surprise tomorrow, we’ll have to wait and see what happens but Williams is strong here and the Mercedes powered cars will be looking forward to the straights. I will try to stay as close as I can to the front two and get some tow. If we have a chance to attack them, then we should go for it.”
Daniel Ricciardo, 6th: “It was a bit scrappy on the final run, we made a couple of adjustments and it didn’t quite work out – but that’s hindsight! We were close to third, but not close enough and we paid a bit of a price by being sixth. We’ve made progress throughout the weekend and we were not too far off, but it’s disappointing to just miss out. The times were close, but it could have been better. Hopefully we can get a good start tomorrow and see how we go, the strategy will be interesting.“
Christian Horner, Team Principal: “If you’d have offered us third and sixth in qualifying before the weekend, I think we’d have definitely taken it! An excellent final lap from Sebastian, he extracted the most out of the car to line up in P3 and Daniel is right up there too in P6. All things considered, it was a good qualifying.”
Thierry Salvi, : “We expected a tough qualifying here due to the track characteristics with those long straights, so Seb did a brilliant job to put the car into third. He finally had a trouble-free session from a reliability point of view, which is obviously the minimum we have to give each time. Daniel as usual pushed very hard and both the drivers are close to each other. Unfortunately with such little lap time gaps between cars, every hundredth has to be extracted from the car and what we could think as ‘details’ can make the difference. Red Bull is still fixed at that third place, which must be our minimum objective tomorrow as well.”
