For the first time since last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Kimi Raikkonen will start in the top-5 following a superb showing in qualifying at Hockenheim. It’s also his best qualifying result with Alfa/Sauber.  

In an incredibly tight midfield battle, Antonio Giovinazzi got knocked out in Q2 and missed out on the final segment of by the smallest of margins. The good news for the Italian is that he’s the first of the drivers on the grid who can choose what tyres to start on tomorrow.  

Raikkonen (P5): “Qualifying in fifth makes me happy but it’s only qualifying, the race is tomorrow. We made a few gains through other people’s misfortunes, but in the end we still had to put in the laps when it counted and we did. The car has been pretty good today and I think we could have been a bit faster in Q3: maybe fourth place was within reach, but that’s racing. It’s very difficult to read into our race pace from yesterday as the conditions have changed a lot and could be even different tomorrow. We have to see if the rain comes and figure out the weather the best we can. It will be hard to race against the big teams; we’ll just take today’s result as it is, give everything tomorrow and see where we end up.” 

Giovinazzi (P11): “It was a bit frustrating to miss out on Q3 for just a hundredth of a second. We start from just outside the top ten, but tomorrow is the important day and I am confident we can get to the points. We wanted more but if we have a good start and a good strategy we can be in that fight. Nobody can predict what weather we’ll have tomorrow and if it starts to rain anything can happen. Having both cars in the top ten is the objective but the key is to continue moving forward.”