Round 4 Post Qualifying Press Conference

FIA Formula 3: Welcome everyone to today's FIA Formula 3 press conference following an exciting Qualifying session here in Spielberg. Joining us, P3 from MP Motorsport, it's Tuukka Taponen. In second place from Campos Racing, it's Ugo Ugochukwu and from Van Amersfoort Racing, capturing his first pole in F3, it's Hiyu Yamakoshi. Congratulations on your first pole position. How does that feel?

Hiyu Yamakoshi: Thank you so much. Yeah, it's amazing. I cannot describe in words - especially from Barcelona, we had confidence and we had a nice package. So to come to the Red Bull Ring and still have a nice momentum from Barcelona, it’s good. In the end of qualifying, I made a mistake in the last push. I just crossed my fingers to hold on to it up and waiting for the pole position. And when I got pole position I cannot describe the feeling. I'm just so happy, so happy with the pole position, especially because this is first pole position for a Japanese in F3 history. So, it is a great, great feeling.

FIA Formula 3: A lot of drivers were talking coming into this one about traffic and potentially a lot of traffic getting in the way during the quali laps for yourself here. Today it looked like the team sent you out of sequence. How much of this was team strategy and how much of this pole position was you delivering on the lap?

Yamakoshi: In the end, it was not our plan A for us to use two sets, but obviously, I made a mistake in the first push. I got track limits and a lap time deleted. And we know the last push is going to be a mess with traffic, in the end, it was a lot of mess. So, for me, I decided to put another tyre on just in case and that time was good enough for the pole position.

FIA Formula 3: It's the first pole in F3 in four years for Van Amersfoort Racing. Last one came in Bahrain in 2022 with Franco Colopinto. What does this mean not only for yourself, but also the team as well?

Yamakoshi: I mean, obviously, I didn't expect to get pole position this year, especially in my rookie year and we know that Campos and Trident were strong last year. We thought they're going to be strong again. And actually, the team did a really good job from the beginning of the year. Then we just built a nice confidence and then I think we got back some nice speed.

FIA Formula 3: Well, congratulations on the pole position. P2 Ugo, coming to you. It seems like it's been a challenging day for yourself. I mean, just getting that P2, how challenging was it?

Ugo Ugochukwu: Yeah, overall, it wasn't the easiest morning in Free Practice, had a little bit of a reliability issue in the second run. So missed out on a few laps. But still pretty confident going into quali that I can put it together and do the job. The first run was a bit tricky, obviously, being at the far end of the top 12. So, I knew I needed to make a little bit of a step on the second run and it worked out pretty well. Got a clean lap, got on the front row. So overall, pretty happy with that.

FIA Formula 3: You mentioned the clean lap with about eight minutes to go. It looked like there was a pretty massive queue of cars trying to get ready to do push laps for yourself. Were you able to fight through the traffic or were you put in a good position to start the lap?

Ugochukwu: Yeah, it wasn't easy in the warmup laps. I came out the pits probably around P9, P10, but everyone was like first gear going to T3. No one wanted to leave the train and go without a slipstream. So it was a difficult decision. I decided to go ahead for the warmup laps at least and try to get a good tyre temp in. And yeah, it worked out pretty well being more towards the front. It just allowed me to get a clean run at the end of the quali. So overall, it worked out pretty well.

FIA Formula 3: All right. Thank you very much. Coming to you, Tuukka. At one point, it seemed like you were on pace for maybe pole position out there. Just how close was it for you to get pole?

Tuukka Taponen: Yeah, it was obviously very close, just missing pole by four hundredths. I set the fastest lap with my first set and I couldn't improve with the second set. As Ugo said, it was a bit messed there, so it was difficult to get good track position and improve the lap time.

FIA Formula 3: Talk to me a bit more about that. Was it really challenging for you guys out there to actually find clean air?

Taponen: Yeah, it was quite tough. We as a team were quite far in the queue and it was not easy to get the tyres ready for the push lap. In terms of track positioning, it was also not great. So I had to already abort that first lap and tried to hope that I can improve with the second lap with that second set, but we couldn't. But anyway, it was still enough for P3.

FIA Formula 3: Thank you everyone.