Max Verstappen: "It has been a difficult weekend so far.

"In the Sprint, we had a difficult start, which compromised our race, but we know what went wrong and had some issues with the graining and the balance of the car. Going into the Qualifying session, we changed a lot on the car but it didn't make much difference unfortunately. It is very complicated at the moment and quite difficult to drive for me to get a good reference in and build on this, so each lap is tricky. We had similar issues to the Sprint, so there will be a lot to analyse and work on overnight. I hope that tomorrow we can be a little more competitive, but let's see what happens."

Isack Hadjar: "The Team put in a lot of work to improve performance from yesterday, and I felt that I extracted all I could from the car. We've managed to find a little more pace, but the consistency from lap to lap has been harder to find. In the Sprint, everything was working well until the contact, which makes it harder to get a read on tomorrow's race. Coming out of qualifying, it's a good feeling to be close to Max but at the same time we'd like to fighting for better positions. P9 is still a decent result to be able to fight for positions, even if it's not exactly where we wanted to be. Tomorrow my aim is to bring home my first points for the Team. It'll be a tough race, but we will do our best."

Laurent Mekies: "It has certainly been a tricky weekend so far and it started in a difficult way in FP1 yesterday already. From the first laps we couldn't find the same feeling from the car that we had in Melbourne last week, so that has been a bit of a struggle. Max, Isack, and the whole Team have been working very hard to close the gap to the competition and to recover a better feeling with the car. We made a little bit of progress to close the gap in terms of performance but it's of course not enough and not something we can be happy with. The most important aspect is that we complete our understanding during the race tomorrow of why it has been more difficult for us this weekend compared to Melbourne. In all cases, there will be huge learnings to take in tomorrow's race: as we have seen in Melbourne and in the Sprint this morning, there will not be a lack of on-track actions and we will be working hard to take any opportunities that may come our way."