08/07/2017
NEWS STORY
Felipe Massa qualified 17th and Lance Stroll 18th for the Austrian Grand Prix. Both drivers went out in Q1 on the ultrasoft tyre, but were knocked out of the session having struggled for qualifying run performance over the course of the weekend. Felipe's best time of the session was 1:06.534, with Lance setting a fastest time of 1:06.608.
Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: It wasn't a good day for us. We simply weren't quick enough, there's not much more to say than that really. We've had good and bad balance through the weekend so far, but in the end it's not about the balance, we just simply aren't quick enough today. We did a lot of work overnight trying to understand the pace from yesterday but none of the things we've tried really adjust the fundamental issue, so we need to go away and analyse that further to see where we are. On the positive side, when we ran high fuel yesterday we looked to be in our normal competitive position and so we're hopeful we can make some progress during the race tomorrow.
Felipe Massa: We definitely struggled to make the tyres work and get the best lap out of the car, so it was a disappointed qualifying for me and the team. I had a lot of oversteer in Turn Six, which cost me a couple of tenths. But we need to concentrate on the race tomorrow. We know that the race pace is much better than qualifying pace, but starting 17th definitely makes our life tricky and quite difficult for the race, so we need to concentrate 100 percent on that.
Lance Stroll: It is not the best day for the team as we just didn't improve from yesterday. We have been struggling with the car all weekend and have been trying to work on the balance to improve it. We are simply losing time in the high speed corners to some of the other cars. On the positive side, we are better on our long runs than we were in qualifying on our short runs and that gives us hope going into the race. Tomorrow the race will be long and all we can do is see what happens.
Check out our Saturday gallery from Spielberg, here.