Photo credits: Scuderia AlphaTauri
It was a solid and somewhat unexpected Saturday for the Yuki Tsunoda and Nick De Vries in Monaco, with Tsunoda qualifying in P9 and his teammate De Vries slotting into P12. Tsunoda spoke how getting into Q3 in Monaco was special and a little unexpected.
“I didn’t expect going into Q3, the team did such a great job giving me an amazing car and I super enjoyed it. First time going into Q3 in Monaco, it’s definitely special.”
Looking forward to tomorrow and Tsunoda doesn’t want to waste this great starting position and instead wants to turn it into a points finish.
“Tomorrow I will give everything like always and hopefully I will maximise this opportunity as much as possible. Hopefully we can score points.”
Tsunoda’s Dutch counterpart was equally satisfied and spoke of his patience to building up the pace for qualifying throughout the weekend. De Vries missed out on Q3 by 0.051s.
“I think it’s been a quite a decent weekend until now. We’ve been chipping away constantly and as you could see in qualifying the lap times have only really coming alive now, and that just proves how patient you have to be here and how much evolution there is, and also how important it is as a team to improve and evolve with the changing circumstances which is very challenging.”
De Vries was happy to get the lap in when it counted and agrees his team managed the traffic issues well.
“You also have the track traffic, the yellow flags, the red flags which I experienced in FP3 when I didn’t get a lap in so very challenging but overall a solid weekend so far. Obviously we want more but it was decent.”
He stressed that he just wants to do his own race tomorrow and is not thinking of opportunities that may arise ahead due to mishaps of others.
“Being key this weekend has been building up to it and staying out of trouble. We shouldn’t be trying to create opportunities tomorrow we just need to execute the best possible race from our behalf and whether that’s P11, 12, or 13 or P10 then so be it, but we’ve got to execute the maximum we can without forcing anything unnecessary.”
Finally addressing the speculation around De Vries holding onto his AlphaTauri seat he sees nothing wrong with speculation, given the issues he’s had and is mature enough to handle it.
“For me there were no surprises and that’s why it wasn’t a shock to me. I just try to focus on my job and do the best I can and so be it.”
