Gasly wants to break his ‘curse’ of Brazilian GP sprint races

Pierre Gasly (FRA / AlphaTauri): “(On his 2nd place in Brazil in 2019) A first podium is always incredible. It is an intense moment in emotion that you do not forget. While doing my reconnaissance tour today (Thursday), I remembered the fight with Lewis Hamilton at the last corner, it was nice. It’s a place that I love, where I have good memories, where the spectators are pretty crazy, so I’m happy to be back. (On his recent results) It’s great to be in such good shape going into the last four races of the season, especially now that we are level on points with Alpine. (with which AlphaTauri is fighting for 5th place among manufacturers, Editor’s note). I have confidence in the team. They are at their very best, at least since I joined. (On the qualifying sprint race on Saturday) I try to see it as an opportunity to change a little the curse that we have had so far. A sprint race means there are two starts (with that of the GP, Editor’s note), so there are twice the chances of losing big. (…) We really had to work on our procedure, try to improve the departures and that’s what we did. We managed to find a lot of performance and be more consistent there, so I’m a little more confident than before.« 

Esteban Ocon (FRA / Alpine): « I feel good, everything is fine, ready to try to bounce back. (…) It’s been two races where we don’t really score big points, where we lack performance. The car is back in the race quite a bit (in Mexico last Sunday, Editor’s note) and I think that, if we had started higher, we could have scored points, so that’s encouraging. But this is the weekend to come back in force. (On the qualifying sprint race) So far it has worked pretty well, we’ve been pretty aggressive with the sprint races in the past. At Silverstone (in Great Britain in July, editor’s note), we had gained a lot of places, leaving far to Mexico, I did a lot of overtaking too, so we are ready to attack this weekend and I think it will be interesting.« 

Charles Leclerc (MON / Ferrari): « (on the qualifying sprint race) I like this format, especially on Fridays. We only have one free practice session and then it goes straight to the « qualif« . It can give us the opportunity to surprise our opponents with better preparation of the car’s settings than theirs. So we will try to give everything. (On McLaren, Ferrari’s closest rival) The last three to four races, we expected to be a little further ahead. This is the first race where we expect to be a little further behind. But we’ll see if it’s confirmed tomorrow (Friday). »