Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: We made some good progress overnight and went into qualifying expecting to be able to get at least one car into Q2. The track was hotter than it had been in FP3, which changed the tyre behaviour a little and slowed the track in the early stages of Q1. However, we adapted to this and Alex was looking strong on his final lap in Q1 until he had a big moment at T7, which ruined his lap.
Nicholas struggled more today having been happy yesterday. It’s not clear why he was unable to find a step forwards today and we are continuing to look into it.
We are not starting the Grand Prix as far forward as we had hoped, however, tomorrow will be a race of attrition as well as pace and we will be looking to move forwards and fighting until the chequered flag.
Alex Albon: The car felt okay and I was feeling good in FP3 but the track was hotter in Q1 and had lost a lot of grip compared to FP3. I think it would have been hard to get into Q2 today, however our lap was looking like it could have got us through. We were on the edge today and on the final lap, with the same corner speed as the lap before, I got massive oversteer; it’s really tricky to drive these cars on the edge, especially for us. Tomorrow will be interesting as you think it would be easy to overtake here but it’s actually quite difficult and there’s some cars here that are faster than we expected.
Nicholas Latifi: Today’s been tricky. We knew coming into the weekend that this would be a difficult track for us. It seemed more positive before qualifying, so it’s a bit of a surprise not being able to make a step up in the session. We had some issues on the second set of tyres which didn’t help as I could’ve improved my lap time by a few tenths. In the end, we were struggling out there for grip.
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