Jani, Schumacher, Vergne… Reactions after the 8 Hours of Bahrain qualifying

Neel Jani (Proton Competition, 4th): « I'm super happy. It was my first qualifying of the year. We don't test like everyone else. It's hard to put everything together. If we can do it, we can aim for a good result, a top 5 for example. Even in the top ten would be good. »

Oliver Rasmussen (Hertz Team JOTA, 11th): « It was fun to be able to ride at the time of the weekend when there is the most grip with the new tires. I rode well, but I don't need much to go into Hyperpole. I was a little surprised by this level of grip. I will take my revenge next time! It's an eight-hour race, a lot can happen. We worked a lot on the settings during the tests. It will be difficult to get the podium. »

Mick Schumacher (Alpine, 17e): « It wasn’t ideal. We had a bit of a difficult tyre warm-up with other cars that were in preparation and got in front of me. So my warm-up lap wasn’t ideal. During the lap itself, the tyres weren’t quite ready because of that. I was trying to improve, but the tyres were dead. I hit the kerb and that took me off the line. So obviously it’s a bit different, complicated compared to what we expected and hoped for, but we have eight hours to make up tomorrow. I don’t think we had the pace for Hyperpole. We’re more focused on the race because we knew qualifying was going to be complicated. »

Jean-Eric Vergne (Peugeot , 18e): « It's a bit frustrating. The car was behaving quite well this weekend, especially in Free Practice 3 this morning. I had a good feeling with the car. In qualifying, I had a sensor problem that made me lose power. That's a few tenths lost. The move to Hyperpole was possible today. It's nothing serious, it rarely happens. It's a shame that it happens in qualifying. I felt it straight away on the pit lap. I had lost two tenths when I started my lap when I had less fuel than this morning. The degradation was very high for everyone in practice, it's not going to be easy to manage it in the race, we're going to do everything we can to finish in the points. There will be opportunities. We'll have to have a good race, like in Fuji, without making any mistakes or penalties. »

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