Pierre Gasly: "I am very happy with P7 in Qualifying today. The team did a very good job to find a lot more performance in the car so big thanks to everyone for their hard work overnight in finding those improvements.

"Yesterday I was not feeling too happy in the car and I could not drive the way I wanted so we definitely had a lot to analyse. We made good changes overnight and it felt much better in Free Practice 3 and we made a few further tweaks ahead of Qualifying where the car felt the best it has been all weekend, so that's really pleasing. I think P7 is the best we could have realistically achieved today given where the top three teams are, so to be quite close to a Ferrari is a good effort from everyone. Tomorrow we will have a challenge on our hands to stay in P7 with some quick cars behind. That is our aim, though, to capitalise on our good starting spot and be on it at the start and any potential restarts. Our high fuel running looked reasonable on Friday so hopefully we can have the pace to compete for good points again."

Franco Colapinto: "It was not the result we were hoping for today coming into Qualifying. This weekend in general, we have really been struggling for pace on low fuel. The car feels and performs much better on high fuel, which hopefully bodes well for tomorrow. In Q1, it was better but in Q2 we didn't take the step we needed in order to give ourselves a shot of making it into Q3. As we saw from what Pierre did, we didn't maximise the full potential of the car. With these cars you really need to be in the right operating window with every little detail to extract the most from it and we weren't. I need to work with the team to understand a few more things and how we can improve. It's my first time driving here, it's an enjoyable track but also a very technical one, so definitely some places where we still need to find improvements. From yesterday, the race pace felt more competitive, so if we can carry that over, we can hopefully fight our way forward in the Grand Prix tomorrow."

Steve Nielsen: "We're still learning so much about these new cars that we came into the weekend off the back of the positive result in China with our feet firmly on the ground. Suzuka is a completely different prospect to Shanghai, or even what we saw in Melbourne, so we were cautious about how we'd fare and wanted to wait for Qualifying for confirmation. What's really promising to see is that with Pierre we were able to replicate the same result from the Qualifying sessions at the previous event in P7. There's no points for Qualifying, but it reaffirms and give us confidence that we have a package that can perform on a variety of circuits. Pierre again put in an incredibly strong performance and showed that he has adapted quickly to these often very challenging new cars. On Franco's side, he didn't make the same step up in performance between sessions and exited in Q2. As a team, we will work hard and give everything Franco needs to better understand why the pace wasn't there and help close that gap. We saw from the high fuel running on Friday that the pace was competitive, so we're hopeful of being in the mix for points again tomorrow with both cars. We know it's a long race and reliability is still a factor early in the season, so we will stay fully focused on the job at hand and hopefully add to our points tally before the spring break."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Suzuka here.