Max Verstappen Took Pole Position for Austrian Grand Prix Sprint

It was a positive day today. I am happy as we started off the day well and the car was in a good window. There was a small issue with the sensor in the practice session but we fixed that really quickly. Heading into qualifying, the car was really strong and I could push. We were quick in the high speed, which is important round here and hopefully we can keep that going tomorrow. Of course, there are always areas that we can do better so we will look at that tonight. Looking to the Sprint race tomorrow, this will give us an early indication of how the pace of the car will be for the race. But all in all, it was definitely a good start and I am looking forward to the rest of the weekend.

I think we were making good progress from the start during the first session and in to Sprint qualifying. We were in the mix today, but unfortunately couldn’t really show it especially in SQ3 with Esteban in front. He left a very big gap in front of him and in the end, we were going to the limit against time and I crossed the line with around a second difference. It’s a shame because we had promising pace today, but unfortunately we were not able to maximise on this because of circumstances out of our control. I’m confident that tomorrow will be a better day, and that we can make up some ground here at our home race.

I’m not happy with today. For sure, the second run in SQ1 with my spin in the last sector compromised our SQ2 run. I over-pushed and went slightly over the limit in Turn 7, and I think I damaged the floor already there and not necessarily when I spun out in Turn 10. It wasn’t the ideal way to enter SQ2, especially with the adaptation in driving style. It’s a shame and definitely towards me; I’ll take the blame and move forward.

It’s a short lap here, so it’s always going to be tricky. We changed quite a lot from FP1, and we’re still trying to learn about the package, but obviously, it’s frustrating when you miss out by a small bit. The second lap of the Sprint-Quali was definitely better than the first one, but we still need to finetune some things. I do think we made the right changes, but maybe we need to balance it better. We’ll try to use the Sprint to understand the car always more, so I’m staying optimistic.