DANIIL KVYAT, Position: 8*, (3rd Practice – 14, 1:11.139)
“We did all we could today with the tricky conditions we had. We got the most out of the car and the session that we could, which is positive. Starting from where we will be starting, it will be a difficult race for us, but if we can get a few points, that will be a good result for the team. We still have a lot of work to do, because qualifying around seventh and eighth is not where we want to be.”
DANIEL RICCIARDO, Position: 14*, (3rd Practice – 16, 1:11.819)
“It was an unlucky Q2 for us. We lost some temperature in the brakes and I was losing time that I couldn’t make up in the high-speed straights. We made a compromise with the set up this weekend to accommodate the penalty we would be facing; we sacrificed some downforce for some straight-line speed. The grid position doesn’t change much for us with the penalty; we’ll try and do what we can in the race tomorrow.”
CHRISTIAN HORNER: “Our first thoughts today are with the victims and their relatives of the terrible tragedy in Graz. As to our performance on the track our focus was very much on a race set up. Dany did a good job to qualify eighth. He probably could have been a bit quicker but the yellow flag for the Mercedes incident meant there was no DRS allowed. It was a difficult session for Daniel, who had some issues on the downshift that we need to look into. It’s going to be a challenging race for us tomorrow, but we’ll do the best we can.”
*Penalties to be applied
Pursuit of Performance
No. 5: Matt Ranft
F1’s visit to Austria isn’t just about the grand prix, as next week the Red Bull Ring hosts the final in-season test of the 2015 campaign. Here Daniel Ricciardo’s Performance Engineer Matt Ranft explains just how valuable a test directly after a race can be…
It’s useful having the test straight after the race because you take the set-ups you’ve run all the way through the weekend and you can hit the ground running on the first day of the test. Also, the track’s usually in good condition, having had a whole weekend of running.
Testing means that you can look back at what you did over the weekend and say ‘where do we need to improve, what could we have done differently’ and we can go and visit that straight away.
Also, by its very nature, you can be a bit more aggressive in testing with the changes that you make. There might be things we would be a bit more conservative about due to the limited running we have in P1 and P2. If the changes you make don’t go right you sometimes then have to take too many steps backwards to go forward. With a full day’s running you can look at some of the options that require a bit more work and refinement in order to give you real benefit. That will definitely be part of our plan over the two days.
We’ve got quite a lot of work to do next week. It’s not just components, we’ll be looking at set-up work, control and calibration work, but there will of course be some testing of parts that maybe haven’t reached full sign-off yet.
The Red Bull Ring is quite a standout track; we can get some really useful information, as the things that make it different are quite difficult and interesting to work with.
You have a lot of camber change through the corners here, where the track drops away, and while you won’t face that exact corner at other venues you will face similar issues and here we can repeatedly look at how that issue affects the car and work on things that address it. We will do more data gathering on the aero side. We’ve had new components on the car and we want to do a thorough assessment of all of those. It will be a pretty intense couple of days.
