Max Verstappen: "It was nice to finish on Pole for the Sprint.

"In practice, we were fine tuning the car and understanding the track. The track got even bumpier which made it more difficult to drive so we kept making some little adjustments to the car. In Sprint Qualifying it was a little bit better. Of course, we went through the compounds and onto the Soft tyre on the final run and we only had one go with it and it paid off. The grip actually improved quite a bit on the Soft tyre compared to the Medium tyre. For us it was all about putting it together and the wind was also changing around quite a bit. To be first was good, it was close and I expect it to also be close tomorrow. We know that in the race the McLarens step it up so it will be tough."

Yuki Tsunoda: "I ran out of time to get my final lap in and it is something we will have to look into because we should have been here talking about a much more successful Friday. It was a bit of a messy session, I don't know exactly what happened because we weren't close to getting the lap in, something went wrong and we lost our opportunity, it's a real shame. It's very frustrating because sometimes these things are out of your control. We need to make sure the rest of the weekend goes better and we get the best out of the car and are where we can and should be in the order."

Pierre Wache, Technical Director: "During any Qualifying session we are trying to maximise the performance of the car by trying to go as low as possible on set-up. During FP1 we tested two types of set-up across the two cars and we realised that Yuki's set-up was a little bit better. It helped the high-speed bottoming that we have in the corners here and it achieved performance in the car without losing out in the low speed. It was a very good performance extraction from Max today and he really put it all together to get Pole. Unfortunately, Yuki didn't have a chance to do more than one lap and clearly, we have to review on our side how to make sure he gets the chance to use the car, because with a second lap I think he would have been in SQ2 for sure."

Check out our Friday gallery from COTA here.