At the end of an incredibly tense qualifying session at the marina Bay Circuit in Singapore on Saturday night, in which as many as 13 drivers improved over last year's pole position time, Sebastian Vettel took the top slot on the grid for the Scuderia Ferrari team.
This result takes the Italian based squad's total number of pole positions to 212, its third at the Marina Bay circuit and the fourth for Sebastian Vettel during his tenure with Scuderia Ferrari to date, three of which have been achieved with the SF70H car.
“Yesterday I wasn't smiling, today I am” said Seb. “When you belong to a team, you need to believe in each other and this is the perfect proof. Our Friday was messy, but our team has worked all night long and I am grateful for that. Here the guys worked all night and got to sleep around breakfast time, I believe.”
“Meanwhile, back at the factory, Charles Leclerc worked at the simulator and other people analysed the data. Yesterday it seemed that we were not competitive enough and a lot of answers were missing. At the beginning of qualifying I was just thinking about doing my job. Then in Q3 I attacked, and I am very happy it worked”.
“For us it's important to turn up (on) the day. If it's a bad day, we want to change it making it a good one because we always try to have good days. I think yesterday was very important for us because we learnt from it. It was a hard lesson but we improved our understanding of the car and the track evolution came to us.”
“Now we probably have a better idea what the car needs. There are always lessons that need to be learnt and I am quite happy that we had a bad day yesterday. We are happy we got the pole today because it always helps. But the race is tomorrow, so we'll see what happens”.
