British Grand Prix – Saturday 9th July 2016. Silverstone, England

Red Bull Racing

Max Verstappen: I think the whole weekend we have been pretty strong and that resulted in a really good Qualifying, the best of my F1 career to date and definitely the best we could do today. Sometimes I have been very unlucky in Qualifying but today has gone well and I was able to show my potential. From now on I will just focus on that and try to keep it up. I’m not focussing on trying to beat my team mate, the points come from the race so that is the important part for me. Silverstone is a great track and I always enjoy driving here. Going through Maggots and Becketts the car is fantastic, no oversteer, no understeer; it feels so nice going through those corners. The car has been performing brilliantly all weekend so I’m looking forward to the race. Hopefully we can maintain this position, it will be important to try and keep up and also keep fighting behind. If it rains we could be a lot closer to Mercedes but if not then we’ll try to just keep position and we will be very happy with that.

Daniel Ricciardo: As a team result it was definitely important to get the second row lock-out. That was our target and we got that so I think we look good for tomorrow. It’s cool to have both of us in front of the Ferraris. I knew this would be a pretty big fight with them here and we managed to at least fight the Qualifying battle so we’ll try and keep them behind us in the race tomorrow. Obviously, I would have preferred third rather than being fourth but that’s how it is today and tomorrow we’ll aim to go better and as good as we can. It’s going to be cooler tomorrow and you never know what’s going to happen, but I think we’re pretty confident where we sit. The two Mercedes will probably fight at the front and behind them it should be a good battle. For sure Ferrari will give us a bit of a run for our money, so there is definitely that third spot up for grabs. You’ll definitely see a race tomorrow.

Williams Martini Racing

Valtteri Bottas: I felt like I got everything out of the car today, which is always a nice feeling as a driver. I was hoping we could be closer to the front-runners. There is a little bit of a gap which we are working flat out for, so the thing to do now is to focus on the race. It’s a new day tomorrow and weather may play a part in the race, so if we can get our tyres to work better than in Austria, I’m sure we can have a good strategy for a good race.

Felipe Massa: It definitely wasn’t a good qualifying for me today, because it was hard to make the rear tyres work in a way that wouldn’t lose performance throughout my lap. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put my lap together because of that. I was a little bit surprised because it’s not the first time we’ve had these issues with the tyres. Hopefully the car will be set-up in a way for the race tomorrow that the pace will be more consistent, because we need to try to make it work tomorrow.

Sahara Force India

Nico Hulkenberg: It looks like I will be starting from P8 and that’s pretty much where we expected to be. It was very tight with McLaren and Toro Rosso in that session and the margins were very small. Unfortunately my final lap in Q3 was deleted because I ran a little bit wide through Copse corner and couldn’t keep the car inside the track limits. Without that, I would have been a place higher up. I think the stewards are correct to insist on these track limits and it’s something we discussed yesterday in the drivers’ meeting, so you have to accept the penalty. Looking ahead to the race, there’s talk of showers once again, and to be honest I don’t mind if we get some rain because it would mix things up. Whatever happens, I just want to have a strong race and bring home some good points.

Sergio Perez: The changes we made to the car after final practice helped us take a step in the right direction. Missing out on Q3 was not ideal, especially by such a small margin, but I am confident we can make good progress in the race. We have the advantage of being the first car with a free choice of tyres and, if I can make a good start, we should be able to fight for some points. Overtaking is quite tricky here so the first few laps are very important and you need to get good track position. Degradation is high, but we have done a lot of work to manage it and we have a good understanding of the tyres, so I think we can be competitive tomorrow.

Scuderia Toro Rosso

Carlos Sainz: I’m extremely happy with today’s qualifying result, especially after having had quite a tough Friday yesterday. We stayed until late last night to analyse all the data, we made a few changes on the car and today I felt very comfortable – we found half a second of performance that gave us the opportunity to fight for Q3. It’s incredible how tight the midfield is, but I did a good lap, managed to get that extra tenth and be the top car of the midfield teams. To start from P7 tomorrow is a great achievement for the whole team and I like to thank everyone for their constant hard work. We definitely needed a good qualifying after three comebacks in the last races! Tomorrow we start in a very good position, on the clean side of the grid, and hopefully we can keep going forward – it will be a tricky race for us as the cars around us have better pace, but we will definitely try to beat our competitors and fight for as many points as possible.

Daniil Kvyat: How frustrating! I was held up by Magnussen from Turn 13 onwards during my lap in Q2, so my qualifying was unfortunately compromised… It would’ve been interesting to see what my lap would’ve looked like without this happening, but we were just stuck behind him. To start from P15 is disappointing and not what we were expecting, but the pace of the car isn’t bad so hopefully we can do a good race tomorrow.

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