2025 Japanese Grand Prix - Qualifying

James Vowles, Team Principal: It’s great to see that we are at our third race of the season and the car has remained competitive and able to get into Q3. Carlos has made some brilliant steps in the time since China, and you can see his performance is really coming together now. I’m proud of Alex; he put together a great lap and, from his own commentary, I think there was more in it, but the want and desire to be further ahead than where we are is a good thing. What’s more positive is we have made more of a race than Qualifying car. Let’s see what happens tomorrow with the conditions, but I’m looking forward to it.

Alex Albon: That wasn’t bad! I’m happy with another Q3; we have a pretty consistent car! My best lap felt very different to the other laps though. We need to go through it all and understand why it changed, but that lap felt how I wanted it to feel. The balance that I’d been chasing was there. There are a couple of corners on the track that we’ve struggled with so if we can improve on those, we’ll be even more competitive. Tomorrow looks like it’s going to start off wet and then get drier and drier, so the call to switch will be important. It should be a good race.

Carlos Sainz: Mixed feelings today. We’ve made some good progress this weekend and I felt a lot more comfortable with the car; there are still a few things to adjust here and there of course, but this track requires a lot of confidence and I do feel we’ve taken a step forward. On the other hand, I lost around a tenth on S3 on my last lap, so Q3 was reachable and I’m obviously not happy I missed it. However, I prefer to take the positives from today and focus on tomorrow’s race, where we’ll try to do everything to gain some positions and have a positive Sunday.