It was a difficult day for the local Nikita Mazepin who couldn´t improve from the back of the grid in his home Grand Prix and was defeated by his teammate by almost 4s in Q1. MotorLat had access to an online meeting with the Russian driver where he shared his view on today´s activity in Sochi.

On the big gap with his teammate Mazepin said: “In this particular case I think the session was quite clear we did different strategies cause we weren´t quite sure how Sochi work with the tyres which were intermediates and obviously in Spa the tyres were if you put them only for two laps and here they were for five laps and fortunately they have shown very good pace midway through the session once the tyres started working but then in the end I only had two laps and I couldn´t switch the tyres on so in the end we could have been one or two positions up which would have not changed the whole lot but at least they gave us the option to go different inside the team”

Talking about the track, how much he likes it and the move to Igora drive in 2023 Mazepin said: “Sochi is a cool track to drive both dry and today I tried the wet circuit for the first time I don´t think there has ever been wet running in Sochi. It´s a fluent circuit very technical very special versus some other circuits that I prefer less. Igora driver, I´ve never been there but I´ve seen pictures. Not quite sure what to expect but the bar is set so high in Sochi that I´m sure they will do something good so I´ll enjoy it.”