Drivers React After the Race | 2026 Spanish Grand Prix

It's great today, the win, but of course I think Lando deserved it today, because he was leading and he was unlucky with the VSC. With me, the timing was just about right, because Bono told me coming into the last sector that VSC might be coming, so I dropped the pace, I slowed down a little bit on purpose just to try and see if I could get the VSC just before pit entry, and it went very well for me this time. It's just a bit the nature of the track, you know, when you have that track layout with so much tarmac, people of course risk to go for a move, and I saw what happened, I saw Lewis clip the kerb, so he was going to run wide, and I think if I would have stayed on the track, you touch and there's a big risk of damage. And I decided then of course to join next to the track, and then of course the team told me to give the position back, which I did, and after that just tried to do my race. I think it was quite clear that Lando and Kimi were a lot faster, but Lando got very unlucky with that VSC. The VSC came out after I was already around the last corner, so the others were very fortunate today, or I was just unfortunate, whatever way around you want to look at it. Of course I believe I deserved today, I feel like we did a very good job. I feel like I did everything right this weekend, so for it to be lost like today is just pretty crappy because, you know, it's Formula 1, a race should be won by the best performance and a good strategy, maybe going long and things like that. Today was just a rule that just benefits some people a lot more than other people, and I know that's racing, so I can't be too against it, but if it was the other way around of course it would have suited me, but when I feel like I've driven a perfect weekend and I did such a good job yesterday and I feel like I did a great job today, it hurts. We did the right thing, honestly, I mean if I had to do the race again I would redo exactly the same thing in terms of strategy, starting on the soft and doing a soft hard would have brought me to P4 anyway, doing a hard soft I was just hoping for a safety car at the right moment for us at the end, but that never really happened, so yeah, a bit of shame but at the end we were relying a bit on the luck at the end and we didn't have it, but eventually I feel like we are losing the results we want on the Sunday because of a lack of performance on the Saturday and this is where we should focus. It has been a more positive couple of races, even though the result was far from great today, but it's the story of the season, I just need to focus on the performance, keep trying to help the team, we're obviously in a great place to win with constructors, realistically I'm not in the fight for the drivers and that just allows me to focus on race by race and trying to focus on just getting some good results. From where we started, quite an OK race, just super hard to overtake, so went for an alternate strategy with starting on the hards, but I think the VSC didn't really help at the start and then from there we were just, honestly I was on my own a little bit, so yeah, would have been nice to qualify higher yesterday, I think that was a little bit frustrating on my behalf, but from where we started it's a good race. I'm very happy with the result, I think the team did an amazing job and I maximised everything today and yesterday, so yeah, very proud of the result, very excited for the future. It was pretty painful obviously, from lap one and yeah, not much I really could have done from there, yeah, the timing of the VSC was certainly not ideal for us, starting on the hard and it was just a difficult afternoon. I think it was the maximum that's possible to be honest, tried to do a good lap one, I knew that was going to be important, the goal was to try to get Franco, he did a good lap one and I took the opportunities I got passing Oskar, which wasn't honestly what I was expecting before the race, but then yeah, I did my best, we knew strategy was going to be very important here, but unfortunately with the timing of the VSC we all just boxed, so there wasn't really much strategy. Not very action packed, pretty, yeah, static obviously, started on the soft, so that first or early VSC was obviously our window to pit, managed to get one car at the pit stop there, so great, it was a great job from our boys to get ahead of the Haas, Ocon, that was important because he was quite slow afterwards, so we as a group managed to pull away from him a lot and yeah, from there, as expected, overtaking, very, very hard, everyone's doing identical pace, at least the racing goals in the Alpines. We're all disappointed, I think we deserve much more, we deserve to be in the points today, the plan was to get both Audi's at the start and we managed to do so, we got both of them off the line in between Turn 1 and 2, I got first, Gabi, on the launch and then around Turn 2 I got Nico, so that was very good and we knew that it would be hard to hold them off. I think it was a fantastic race, we were one second faster than the whole midfield for most of the race and yeah, just got unlucky with the VSC, tried something different and unfortunately it didn't work out. Unlucky with the VSC, there is not really much more I can add, just a shame, early in the race we had hard tyres, we couldn't pit, everyone else around us that were in medium or soft pitted, so yeah, we got screwed very early in the race. The race itself, almost finishing the Turn 1, got smashed by behind and got a lot of damage from that, yeah to be honest I think the effect from that was pretty big. Maybe the best we could have hoped for but inevitably not quick enough, I think we managed to hold off one of the Haases which was maybe our accomplishment of the day and it was still, I don't know where we finished. P15. Yeah obviously we got our upgrade in Baku so hopefully that's the saving grace for next week, for the next race. It's been a tough weekend and I only have myself to blame for that, so no hard feelings. I think on the positive side this weekend has taught me a lot, maybe more so than a clean and easy straight forward weekend has done because I've taken a lot from yesterday and of course won't repeat that mistake and anyway the car was strong, whenever I had clean air I was right on pace with our competition. Yeah difficult race, I think we didn't have the pace so eventually we ended up in the position we deserved, yeah we got squeezed into the wall into Turn 5 but yeah I think Carlos received a penalty, it was a difficult race for us after that but as I said the final result with the pace we had probably didn't change much. Long one today, sadly not much action, I was hoping a bit more things to happen but yeah we knew the race pace here could be difficult and it was but yeah we also had to manage quite a bit the temperatures, the brakes, everything so yeah not our finest. A difficult race, in the end it was all about Turn 1, I had a really strong start but unfortunately there was a big bunch up into Turn 1 and I clipped the Yuki and that damaged my floor and from then onwards I just had no downforce, very difficult to keep the car on track in between these walls and on top of that like always this weekend we were lacking a lot of pace and yeah it was a very difficult race. We had a water leak issue on the engine but other than that we were extremely competitive today we were doing a tremendous race, we were ahead of the Williams, fighting with Dalbon within a second or so from him the whole race ahead of Tsunoda so in general terms I think it's been one of the most strongest weekends for us. Yeah I was getting a long pedal, we had damage in the beginning of the race, we had some debris so we lost I think 40, 50 points of downforce and then I was getting a long pedal throughout the race and then yeah the pedal kind of just went to the floor. I just had some problems with the brakes already from Turn 5 and then I came back and then the pedal just went complete stand.