Karun Chandhok talking about Sainz and that he should go to Mercedes: “I'd be on the phone to Toto every single day, sending him every possible metric and spreadsheet of why he is equal to Leclerc.”
Matt Gallagher saying that Carlos Sainz is comparable to Charles Leclerc and he was the one who has delivered all of Ferrari's best moments in 2023 (win in Singapore, pole in Monza).
george russell is interviewed after qualifying, australia - march 23, 2024
(transcript under the cut)
Natalie: "George Russell has walked very quickly from the back of the pen, behind Oscar Piastri there, to join us now! George, a bit of a mixed weekend for the team. How do you reflect on your qualifying today?"
George: "Yeah, of course it wasn't the qualifying we were probably hoping for, but it's so tight out there and tomorrow there's gonna be so many unknowns-thard tire nobody's been on yet-and I think we'll be seeing a bit more of an exciting race here than we usually see."
Naomi: "George, we heard from Lewis in the pen saying that the car felt as if it's on a knife edge and that's why we're seeing such mixed results from you guys. What are you experiencing in the car? Do you share the same sentiment as Lewis?"
George: "From my side, it's… I've been feeling a bit more confident and consistency with the car on my side of the garage. We know where we need to improve; that's the high speed corners, and in Melbourne there's quite a few of those high speed corners, so I think we'll be in a much better place tomorrow when we've got the fuel in the car and the pace is a little bit slower from everybody. But yeah, this circuit's definitely not playing to our strengths."
Karun: "George, everyone seems slightly surprised at the amount of tire deg from the long runs yesterday in practice. We're two days of evolution into the race. Do you still think that's gonna be an issue? Are we still looking at two stops, rather than the one-stop we perhaps expected from last year?"
George: "Yeah, I think the soft and the medium's gonna be a really difficult tire tomorrow, but the hard is a real unknown. I think we saw the medium tire in Jeddah, which is the hard tire this week, can perform really well, but as I said the fact is nobody knows because nobody's ran it, so the team on the pitwall are gonna have to be really dynamic to see the tire deg and we're gonna have to be feeding back a lot to let them know how the tire's feeling."
Naomi: "George, just a last one from me. I just wanna pick back up on what you were saying about your experience being slightly different on your side of the garage. Just for us to understand better, what does that come down to? Is that because you guys are running slightly different setups, or is it just because you demand something slightly different from the car than what Lewis does?"
George: "I'm not too sure, to be honest. From my side, I'm just focused on myself, focused on my team and trying to maximize it, so to be honest I can't really comment on Lewis' feelings. But ultimately, as I said before, we're not quite where we wanna be.
But we had a strong qualifying in Bahrain, P3, and if it wasn't for the problems in the race we would have been fighting for a podium. P5 in the race in Jeddah, so P7 is not ideal, but there's definitely a lot to play for tomorrow, and all to play for."
As grating as Danica's commentary is you have to admit it's hilarious to see how the rest of Sky are reacting
Crofty having to signpost his commentary direction by saying WHAT DO YOU THINK KARUN CHANDHOK and pulling Ted and Bernie into the convo from the pitlane more than usual just to make it less awkward
Danica saying she doesn't get why drivers want to hug the wall so much (*cough* racing line, which EVERY CASUAL WATCHER KNOWS) and just stunned silence in response from Karun