Esteban Ocon qualified tenth for the Austrian Grand Prix, his second Q3 appearance of the weekend. The Alpine F1 driver was impressed by the tightening of the order, but pleased to be among the ‘best of the rest’ just behind Nico Hulkenberg.
“I’m happy, I think it was the most we could do in this qualifying. It’s strange that everyone was so tight, we were more comfortable yesterday with more of a lead over the other drivers in Q2, so it was more complicated” Ocon told Canal+.
“It was hot in Q2 because we had a bad exit, when I shifted it was slow, I don’t know what happened to the gearbox, but we managed to pass and maximize the result We didn’t have any new tires in Q3 so we weren’t ahead of Nico, but it was a good qualifying and we can be satisfied.”
The Frenchman is worried about not being able to score points tomorrow: “It’s going to be difficult to stay in the points, there are very fast cars behind us but we’re going to do our best to try to keep them behind us and score points.”
Pierre Gasly did not make it through Q2 and he regrets set-up changes that were not positive. The Frenchman set the 12th fastest time then lost it and he will start 13th, but that is not what concerns him.
“It wouldn’t have changed anything. Qualifying was difficult, we changed the car after the Sprint this morning but I was sliding everywhere. We never had the potential to do as well as yesterday and we’ll have to see what happened.” notes Gasly, who was not at his best during the Sprint this afternoon.
“It was extremely difficult to overtake, I also had an engine heating problem, we had to compromise the cooling to have more top speed, but we had the performance to be in the top 10 this morning. We won’t start as well but the race is going to be long and we’ll have to come back.”
