Max Verstappen Took Pole Position for Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

I enjoyed the day a lot. The car was really nice to drive and it was a good improvement from yesterday. We improved the car a little bit overnight and came out with a great set up which allowed me to attack the high speed corners and improve the one lap performance. Around this track, it really depends on your confidence level and how much you can go to your limit and today I felt very comfortable with the car. The whole of qualifying has been going very well, especially Q2 and my first lap in Q3. I am proud of today and am looking forward to the race tomorrow. As a Team we are happy with our car and the race pace and we really found our stride today. It has been a great job from the whole Team.

It would have been nice to have locked out the front row but I think we are in a good position to fight tomorrow. I felt like we took a back from practice, we had a positive Thursday but qualifying was not the same case unfortunately. The whole day hasn’t been as good as yesterday, I didn’t get the best out of the tyre preparation, in combination with the balance. So, we have to understand and review why that was but what we did to the car should hopefully mean we are stronger in the race.  It’s important to get past Charles as soon as possible and be in the mix, especially with the DRS zones I think it is going to be important to make progress early. I believe we have stronger race pace than Ferrari but degradation can kick in and change things very quickly. It is always a challenge here but you can overtake and race and there is a long way ahead of us.

We did it! I’m very happy today. The team did a fantastic job of giving me a nice car, and I enjoyed it, so a huge thanks to everyone. We were expecting it to be difficult, but I focused on myself to extract as much performance from the car as possible, and I’m pleased I was able to put it all together. It’s the first Q3 of the year and it’s given us extra confidence for the future. I enjoyed today a lot, but tomorrow won't be easy, so we now focus on the race. We have a lot of experienced people, and I’m confident we can maximise our package and score some points.

It was a very frustrating qualifying. Compared to Bahrain, where I was more frustrated with myself because I knew there was more time on the table, today was a little bit more of a mystery. I know where the time was, but I don’t know how we could’ve got it in that session. I was confident going into qualifying, and I was feeling quite good in the car, but on the second run, I made a mistake. Nonetheless, we were still in the fight. Once in Q2, everyone was improving their lap time, but I felt like I couldn’t get any more out of what I had, and we just plateaued. It wasn’t a matter of understeer or oversteer, but more that I didn’t have the grip compared to the others. Well done to Yuki, he did a great job! Thinking of tomorrow, I have a few areas in mind to analyse, so we’ll look into them and hopefully, we'll find more performance for the race.