Zhou Guanyu – “I don’t think we quite had the speed to fight for Q3”

It was a disappointing day for Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN as they saw both drivers not make the final part of qualifying despite showing competitive pace throughout the Friday practice sessions.

After getting through to the second part of qualifying, Zhou Guanyu was knocked out of Q2 in a lowly fifteenth place despite showing some good pace on Friday afternoon after he came back into the car in FP2 due to Robert Kubica taking his place in the first session. The Chinese driver struggled to find the pace in the car for his final lap in the session, but still managed to qualify ahead of his teammate for the second time in a row.

“I feel I got as much as I could out of the car tonight, as my qualifying performance was alright: unfortunately, we weren’t close enough in terms of pace to be a little further up the grid. Yesterday, everything was working fairly well, while today has been more difficult.

We struggled a bit during FP3 earlier today, and even though it seemed like we got our pace back in the afternoon, I don’t think we quite had the speed to fight for Q3.

“We definitely hoped for more, but nevertheless as the midfield was pretty close during Q1, we will hopefully be able to move further up to deliver the results we worked so hard for.”

Valtteri Bottas – ”Today’s result doesn’t really reflect where our car actually is”

Valtteri Bottas was a surprise casualty of the first qualifying session, the fin missed out by three tenths of a second to his teammate which is disappointing considering his pace throughout Friday.

The ten-time race winner will be hoping to battle his way through the pack tomorrow from eighteenth and fight for points to help Alfa Romeo fend off Aston Martin in their battle for sixth in the constructor’s championship, with five points separating Alfa Romeo in front of Aston-Martin.

“We went into qualifying knowing we had good pace, so I believe today’s result doesn’t really reflect where our car actually is. It was a strange feeling, we just couldn’t get the tires to work in our outlap and, as a result, our sector one pace suffered.

This was especially so on my second run – there was so much traffic at the end of the outlap, I had to pretty much stop and that destroyed our attempt. It’s frustrating, of course, but now we need to prepare in the best possible way for tomorrow’s race.”

Credit: Antonin Vincent / DPPI