Qualifying - Abu Dhabi GP report: Red Bull Renault

DANIEL RICCIARDO

“I’m happy with the session; I think we’ve done really well. We were able to improve in every session and the weekend so far has been pretty smooth. Our lap time kept on getting better and better and that’s when you know the session’s gone well. You find a few tenths each run. Last year, one of my best qualifying performances was here and today sort of backed that up. Our target for tomorrow is definitely to keep the Williams behind us and find a way around Perez. He was really quick today. I hope they fade a bit in the race. It should be interesting tomorrow. We won’t have an easy time passing them on track but at least it’s a track where you can overtake. The DRS zones are good and you can definitely have a go.”

DANIIL KVYAT

“Not running in FP3 unfortunately comprised our day and the car didn’t feel right. We were hoping it wouldn’t affect us too much this evening, but it did and I just didn’t feel comfortable out there. Not running in P3, after the small issues which we had yesterday, meant we had to go into qualifying a bit blind. Luckily we did a few long runs in P2 yesterday which was quite useful and will be helping us tomorrow. We will try to make up some places then, so hopefully we will be able to take something out of it.”

CHRISTIAN HORNER

“It was a fantastic lap from Daniel, possibly one of his best of the season, to line up fifth for the race tomorrow. He set a blistering pace in Sector Three, which made up for the time lost in Sectors One and Two. Dany matched Daniel’s pace in Sectors One and Two but unfortunately lost out in Sector Three and will line up ninth. We can realistically expect to have a strong race from these grid positions and we will be looking to capitalise on that tomorrow to end the season with the best results possible.”