Rio Haryanto expressed his satisfaction over beating highly-rated teammate Pascal Wehrlein in qualifying for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Having been behind his German teammate on Friday, Haryanto cited various tweaks to the set-up as the reason to why Haryanto managed to beat Wehrlein over one lap at Silverstone.
“Qualifying went quite well for me. We made a big change overnight because yesterday I was lacking pace and I’m happy with the changes. In FP3 I was much closer to the other guys in front and, in qualifying, I was able to be more competitive compared to previous sessions.
We improved the car and that helped me a lot. On my quick lap, I made a few small errors on the last section and I think I could have gotten one of the Renaults in front of me.”
Haryanto was three-tenths shy of making it into Q3 and after Wehrlein scored Manor’s first points of the season in 2016 at the last race in Austria, the Indonesian driver believes Q2 was a step too far this weekend due to the high downforce nature of the Silverstone circuit.
“Coming here, we knew it was a track that would be quite difficult for us because there’s a lot of high-speed corners and were lacking downforce,” he said.
“Today, to get to Q2 would have been amazing and we’ve worked hard to get even close to Q2. I think we were maybe 0.3 off but I’m impressed by the work the team have done over the last few races. At a track tough for us, to get close to the other guys is really good.”
