Haas F1’s Nico Hülkenberg and Kevin Magnussen qualified 12th and 18th respectively for Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix.
Red Bull Max Verstappen took pole position at the Suzuka circuit followed by his teammate Sergio Perez making it a Red Bull front row lock out. Lando Norris will start his McLaren from P3.
For the American owned team, qualifying was a little different. Kevin Magnussen was knocked out of Q1 when he put his fastest time of 1:29.821. He was not happy about the result but was optimistic that he can make ground in the race.
“I think we improved the car for qualifying, but we started quite far from where we were with the set-up from yesterday. It’s not been the cleanest run-up to qualifying, we’ll run this set-up tomorrow, but we improved the car and the consistency – it’s still just lacking pace.
“We knew this track wasn’t going to be our track, but on top of that, on our side of the garage, we’ve maybe just missed the beat a little bit on the build up to the weekend. Anyway, we have a race tomorrow, and hopefully – like the first three races of the season, we can make some ground up in that. We’ll certainly be trying.”
On the other hand, Haas’s other driver Nico Hulkenberg was able to put his car in a much higher position as he made a big step in Q2 to outqualify Bottas, Albon and Ocon. Talking during the post-qualifying interview, the German was very pleased by the result.
He stated that he and his team managed to extract maximum results from the car and he is happy with P12 after struggling around Suzuka last year.
“I’m really happy and very pleased with the performance, they were good, clean laps – I enjoyed qualifying.
“Last year, I had a messy session, so this time I was really keen to have a clean one and I think we really exploited the maximum out of our package, even if it’s really marginal that we missed Q3 as that really was as good as it is for us.
“Yesterday, things weren’t looking so great in FP1, as expected our package isn’t super happy around Suzuka, so I’ll take P12 happily.”
Haas’s team principal, Ayao Komatsu was happy with the team effort. He was a little disappointed that they couldn’t manage to put Magnussen into Q2 and is very much looking forward to the race which also happens to be his home event.
“Overall as a team, it was a good qualifying session. We wanted to get into Q2, which we couldn’t quite manage with Kevin but even then, we made some set-up changes which he was very happy with…All round, a good recovery from practice in difficult conditions with an exposing weakness at this track, but as a team I think we worked well.”
