Nikita Mazepin was seen in tears on Friday after the Qualifying session.  After the sprint race, MotorLat had access to an online media session where Nikita explained what happened to him and talked about his first time ever in Brazil. On the reason why he was so emotional after the Qualy on Friday he said, “it was mostly to do with a mistake in Qualifying lap. I´m going through a pretty challenging period in the last few races not only to do with the car balance but also with some internal things going on in the team, that makes the results more important at this particular moment in time and when you come so close to finishing, what I felt, was a great lap with the car we currently have and then by your own doing try too hard and lose that lap it hurts.  I work quite hard with a specialist to make sure that my emotions behave correctly when I´m in the car but I think when you jump out of the car and you only have four minutes to or so until you speak to the journalists who ask you questions that ultimately bring back those memories and you know what could have been a different result it just feels sad there´s not much else in my life other than racing, in fact, there´s nothing. So I put my life on the line for this and I get upset which is natural when things don´t go well.”

When asked to elaborate on the internal things that are going Nikita Mazepin talked about some people who are working with him right now that won´t be there next year. “that´s a challenge” he said.  One of the reasons why these people are leaving is the long calendar that teams and drivers will have to face next year. The driver is sad about losings his coworkers but understands the choices “they´re right and I respect families should come first. Sport is all I do in my life but I´m only 22 but If I was 10 years older and I had kids I would make similar decisions as what they do”

Nikita didn´t want to name the people leaving out of respect and privacy he just said, “my team of engineers hasn´t been the same and it has been changing since Turkey. It is really challenging it´s not like an office job where you come in do some things and go away. To succeed in racing, I know what it takes and it takes a special bond of people who work very hard and you do it vice versa. This sort of drive keeps going forward and enable me to achieve results in previous years.”

When he was asked by MotorLat if he was feeling better today he said, “I´m better. I think we did a good work today. We did a lot of laps during Fp2 and the sprint format that we have this weekend. I´m quite happy with myself how I adapted to the track because I was quite concerned coming here with only watching YouTube videos of the place which seemed very challenging. On that respect, I think I´m doing an O.K job. As a team, we are a bit further in a race distance to our competitors than we would like to be but we´re making some steps to be closer to them tomorrow.”