Neel Jani (Proton Competition, 4e) : « I'm super happy. It was my first qualifier of the year. We don't test like everyone else. It's hard to put it all together. If we get there, we can achieve a good result, a top 5 for example. Even in the top ten it would be good. »
Oliver Rasmussen (Hertz Team JOTA, 11e) : « It was fun to be able to ride at the time of the weekend when there is the most grip with the new tires. I rode well, but I don't need much to pass into Hyperpole. I was a little surprised by this level of grip. I'll get my revenge next time! It's an eight-hour race, a lot can happen. We worked a lot on the settings during testing. It will be difficult to get the podium. »
Mick Schumacher (Alpine, 17e) : « It wasn't ideal. We had a bit of a difficult tire warm-up with other cars that were in preparation and ended up in front of me. My preparation round was therefore not ideal. During the lap itself, the tires weren't quite ready because of this. I was trying to improve, but the tires were dead. I hit the curb and it took me out of the way. So obviously it's a little different, complicated compared to what we expected and hoped for, but we have eight hours to make up tomorrow. I don't think we had the pace for the Hyperpole. We are more focused on the race, because we knew that qualifying was going to be complicated. »
Jean-Eric Vergne (Peugeot, 18th): « It's a bit frustrating. The car behaved quite well this weekend, especially during Free Practice 3 this morning. I had a good feeling with the car. In qualifying, I had a sensor problem which caused me to lose power. This represents a few tenths lost. The passage to Hyperpole was possible today. It's nothing serious, it rarely happens. It's a shame that this happened in qualifying. I felt it straight away on the exit lap. I lost two tenths when I started my lap even though I had less fuel than this morning. The degradation was very high for everyone in practice, it will not be easy to manage it in the race, we will do everything to finish in the points. There will be opportunities. We will have to have a good race, like in Fuji, without making any mistakes or penalties. »
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