Seidl wanted to attack Mercedes: "There might be a chance to beat them"

Andreas Seidl will be happy with the performance today from Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo, despite only one of the duo getting into Q3. However, both will start in the top 10 tomorrow, after Carlos Sainz and Kevin Magnussen have dropped to the back of the grid. The German is over the moon with how Saturday has ended for McLaren.

"Really happy with the outcome of qualifying today, and the entire team back home has put in so much energy to bring these upgrades to the track," Seidl told Sky Sports after the session.

He highlighted the fact that improvements could be easily seen over Friday and the final practice session this morning, "we could see already yesterday that it was looking positive and that we have taken a step, and again overnight we took a step with the drivers extracting the max from the package," before adding that "there is nothing better to confirm it in qualifying."

The McLaren team principal finished off by stating the chance of a strong finish tomorrow and that attacking Mercedes was a key today, which worked in their favour: "Now we need to see how it looks over the long run, but starting P5 and P9 is good. What we have seen in Free Practice is Mercedes struggling a bit, so we went into qualifying thinking that there might be a chance to beat one or two of them."