30/06/2018
NEWS STORY
Lance Stroll qualified 15th and Sergey Sirotkin 18th for the Austrian Grand Prix. Both Lance and Sergey qualified on the ultrasoft Pirelli tyre. Sergey made consecutive lap-time improvements but failed to make it out of Q1 due to a yellow flag on his final run. Lance made it into Q2 and continued to better his lap times throughout both sessions. Lance will start P14 and Sergey P17 due to a gearbox penalty for Leclerc.
Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: The team did some good work yesterday which allowed us some changes overnight. We made some progress with the balance and stability of the car, which I think we saw today. Some great laps from Lance helped get us into Q2, and Sergey could have most probably done the same if Leclerc had not caused a yellow flag on his final lap. Overall, we are in much better positions for the race than we were in France, and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve tomorrow in the race. Finally, I'd like to say well done to the drivers and team for a great job so far this weekend.
Lance Stroll: I am pretty happy with getting into Q2. Looking back at it, I think there was more in it, as we only had one set of tyres because we put three sets on in Q1, which isn't normally what our run plan is. But this time we just wanted to put all our effort into getting out of Q1, which put us on the back foot for Q2. I think we missed out a little bit on the balance in Q2, as with some of the track improvement I think we could have probably put some more front wing on it and that would have helped us gain some more positions. However, all in all I think we have to be pretty satisfied with getting into Q2 and it is a step in the right direction.
Sergey Sirotkin: It was a disappointing qualifying. I think it was one of those cases where we could improve from practice and put the car more together and still improve it through qualifying. We had the pace to get through into Q2 even with the tiny margins in it, but my out-lap was strongly compromised with the traffic. Despite this, I was able to improve my time on the first half of lap, before the yellow flag. After the yellow flag we had to abort the lap as there were a lot of cars ahead of me. Looking ahead to tomorrow, our long run pace in FP2 was promising so I am ready for tomorrow.
Check out our Saturday gallery from Spielberg, here.