this question bro 😭😭😭
"how is it possible for things to change so much on a car? yesterday you've talked about philosophical matters on your car. but as far as i'm concerned, i don't know that philosophy can make a car go any faster."
🆑: when i say philosophical, it's more about small details that just fit my driving a little bit better in a particular phase of the corner. i don't want to go too much into detail there. but it's just a few things that i saw on the data on friday night and i was like, "ok, that might be things that just don't fit with my driving style." and we changed those few things from sprint race to qualifying and that was a lot better. so yeah, i was very proud of the work we've done to see that because i think this kind of change is not really so black and white. you just don't look at data and say, "my God, OK, this is what we need to change." it's intuition mixed with feeling. then we went for it and it was actually a very successful direction for me. i was very happy.
"does the negative comments become fuel for you to kind of prove things wrong? carlos in the pen said he's always admired your ability to bounce-back and how you do sort of respond to setbacks in this way."
🆑: well, i don't know if it fuels me. honestly, i think anybody that says that would lie. i think whenever there's so much negativity around, it's not something so nice to see. so no, you try to cancel the noise as much as possible. i try to not look at my phone and focus on what is relevant and in order to also have the right picture of the situation, because things are said and you go from hero to zero, from zero to hero, in like two days in this sport, and so it can influence then the way you see a situation. so no, my job was really to just try and cancel that noise, to not look at anything, to not listen to anything. and i know that i didn't become a bad driver from one day to the other. it was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car. these cars are very specific, are very different to the way we've been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it. i was very strong for the first part of the season, then i lost a bit of feeling with the car. we changed quite a few things with the car and it took a bit more time than what i had wished to get back to the level i wanted. and on top of that, we've had some issues on the sunday that cost me quite a lot of points. so altogether, it wasn't a nice situation to be in, but i'm very happy to get out of this situation in this way. however, as i said, it's still the beginning. it's only one race and i must not get carried away thinking that the war is over. i mean, the battle with this car has been quite a lot recently and i cannot take it for granted that now it's behind me. so, i'll keep working and try to get that feeling more often going ahead.
"i knew what to do inside the car, i knew what to change in terms of tools that i have on my steering wheel. i just felt very comfortable in the car, especially in the first stint. so yeah, then I understood that the win was a possibility. it was going to be tricky with kimi at the end, so we've been a little bit lucky on that, but we also need that sometimes"
"this makes up for what happened here in 2021 as well, when you led for most of the race."
CL: yeah, i didn't really think about that when i was in the car, but yeah, i don't know if it made up for it, but yeah, it feels very good.
"obviously there's a lot of negativity around me in general, with narratives being created, and it's never a nice environment to work in. but to keep our head down and to keep working very hard and get the result that we got today, i'm super proud of the whole team that have been pushing me and helping me to find that feeling again with the car. as i said, it's only a first step and i've got to prove that on multiple track layouts. but on such a track where confidence is key, i wouldn't have been able to do that without the feeling, and so that's really good."