Kevin Magnussen “We have to be happy with Q3, but the car was better than P10”

Kevin Magnussen will start inside the top ten for a second consecutive weekend on Sunday, but the Dane was happy to hear that team-mate Mick Schumacher was able to avoid injury after crashing heavily in Q2 on Saturday.

Schumacher crashed at the turn eleven/twelve section of the Jeddah Corniche Circuit and brought out the red flags, with the medical team attending to him immediately.  He was later taken to hospital as a precaution, but Magnussen praised the safety of the car for giving his team-mate every opportunity to get out of a horrible looking crash without injury.

“I’ve heard Mick is uninjured which is good and incredible when you see the crash that he had, but the safety is so good with these cars with the fact that you can walk away from a crash like that, it’s impressive,” said Magnussen.

“I think he was having a great qualifying session up until that point and he was up for a good result, so he’ll just need to come back and get on the horse and bounce back.”

Despite missing a lot of running on Friday due to a multitude of issues, Magnussen was pleased to bounce back on Saturday and fight again for a place inside the top ten, although he does not feel he got everything out of his VF-22 or himself when it mattered.

Magnussen was only half a second down from Qualifying inside the top five, but with how tight the midfield battle is at this early stage of the season, that half a second meant a tenth-place start for Sunday’s race in Saudi Arabia.

“We have to be happy with Q3, but the car was better than P10, I didn’t get the most out of it,” said Magnussen.  “Honestly my neck just completely broke in Q3 – suddenly it snapped, and I couldn’t hold it.

“I wasn’t driving well, I think maybe there was a P5 in the car, there’s only half a second up to P5 and my best lap in Q3 was on used tyres – and not a great lap as I said. The team had a P5 in it, but I didn’t.”