So it's Austin! Glad to have the F1 circus in America for a change. Let's hope for a good end of the season for Kimi. From Austin on, it's a head to head battle for P4 in the Driver's Championship against Vettel and Verstappen.
quoteKimi: “We keep improving to get the results we deserve”
I like the race in Austin: it’s a nice town and people are very polite. I think it’s good for F1 and for Ferrari that we come to the US, and hopefully we can have a good weekend. But it’s hard to say who is going to be the fastest here and what we are going to get on Sunday. Tomorrow we’ll start as any other race weekend, doing our things and we’ll see where we are. The circuit is interesting, quite a new one and the design is nice. Usually there’s quite a good racing here, which is good for us as drivers and also for the spectators. Last year it was a pity for the weather conditions, this year it looks ok so let’s see what happens. We keep working all the time and obviously in some races we have been strong and in others not as strong as we hoped. We are doing things right and we are improving, but we still have a lot of work to do, it’s a never-ending work in progress. Last race was good but did not give us the result we should have got, so we are there to try again.
“It was a tricky day: in the first session, we struggled to find the right set up, and in the second practice I went off with new tires and couldn’t set a lap time. Apart from that it was a normal Friday, it looks worse than it is. We did a normal set up work and sometimes it goes like this. We did not have any major issue, we just tried to make a sense out of it and get the car exactly where we wanted. Now we have some work to do on the set up and make it correct for tomorrow. The Mercedes look very strong as they have been all year, but we’ll do our best.”
quoteKimi: qualifying result due to ‘lack of overall grip’
“Obviously we cannot be pleased with where we finished today, looking at the time difference to the front. We did what we could, but our position on the grid is far from ideal. This is the reality today and now we have to be stronger in the race. Yesterday we struggled a bit to find the right set up: we changed small things here and there and today the handling of the car was pretty good. We lack speed in the lap and to go faster we need more overall grip. Tomorrow is going to be a long race, the long run was not too bad, so I expect the car we had today to be better tomorrow. For sure we are going to do our best and hopefully we are going to have a strong race.”