Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc set the fifth and seventh fastest times in qualifying for the Mexico City Grand Prix. It was a very closely contested session in which the F1-75 did not show its full potential. Tomorrow's race will be long and very open as the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez looks like offering up a high altitude six-way battle between the top teams.

Tonight, the team will study all the data to see how best to move up the order over tomorrow's 71 race laps. Overtaking is not easy at this circuit, but not impossible and Carlos and Charles are definitely up for the fight. The race gets underway at 14 local (21 CET) in front of what will no doubt be the most excited and festive crowd of the whole season.

Carlos Sainz: It was a difficult qualifying. Riding the kerbs was very tricky for us, especially in the first two sectors, which meant it was challenging to put together the perfect lap.

I tried everything out there today to get a better result but couldn't make it. Nonetheless, the weekend is not over and we will fight hard all the way to the chequered flag.

Charles Leclerc: We had a tough qualifying, losing quite a bit of time down the straights and not having a great feeling in terms of drivability.

We need to investigate the reasons for this, so that we can improve and challenge our competitors tomorrow.

Laurent Mekies, Racing Director: It was a tight qualifying today. This season, we've got used to being higher up the grid, but today we had to settle for 5th and 7th.

It's probably fair to say that we were not totally satisfied with the behaviour of our cars on this track, and that there are perhaps a few things we still need to crack around here to be more competitive.

That being said, we think the potential is there. The gaps were relatively small and at some stage in Q2 it felt like we could be in the fight for better positions, but as it turned out we will start behind our competitors tomorrow.

It's a long and tough race here, we have seen many cars struggling more than usual with a lot of sliding and it could be a race full of surprises with hopefully some opportunities for us to bring home plenty of points.

We focus tonight on trying to understand how to extract a bit more from the package we have here, and we will try our best to be in the fight tomorrow.

Check out our Saturday gallery from Mexico City here.