08/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Pierre Gasly: "I'm pretty happy with today, we haven't had any upgrades for a few races, so we know compared to other cars we've been struggling quite a bit more lately. It's always frustrating to miss out on Q3 by such a small margin, but I must say I was pleased with my lap, it was pretty tidy and I was able to put it altogether for Quali today. We're starting just out of the top 10 for the Sprint tomorrow, so we're in a good position to make our way forward and hopefully move into the points on Sunday. We need to work more, as we can't be satisfied with the overall performance, but we know we have some upgrades coming, so if we are able to improve from this current baseline then we should be quite competitive in the upcoming races."
Yuki Tsunoda: "I'm really disappointed with today. I was happy with the balance of the car and how we were progressing through Quali, but unfortunately on my last push in Q2 my tyres were cold, I had a huge snap at Turn 1, this ruined my lap, so I couldn't progress further. I think the pace of the car was quite good and we had a chance to get through to Q3 today, so it's a real shame."
Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer): "We are in Austria for our second sprint event of the season and, as is typical for this format, our Friday has been a very busy day! We enter Parc Ferme as soon as we leave the pits for Qualifying, so we have to do all of our setup work in the one-hour FP1 session - on a typical weekend we normally have all three practice sessions to complete this. So, we kept the car on track for as much running as possible, with minimal changes between the runs. The session was used to understand the general car balance and to check the stabilised temperatures over a sustainable run. The high wind made it quite difficult, with the balance being different corner to corner. Also, there is a lot of warp in the track, so brake locking made some corners inconsistent, particularly T3.
Heading into Quali we knew the competitiveness was not enough for Q3 and actually with the short track, we were close to the Q1 cut-off, so we elected to have three runs in Q1. This worked well and both drivers progressed through to Q2. This meant we were left with only a single new set of Softs, so we set the first timed on the Used tyres, before fitting the new tyre for the last lap. The step-in grip was there, and Pierre put his best sectors together to finish P11, only 9ms away from a place in Q3. Yuki's prep lap didn't quite go to plan, so he had cold tyres going into T1, he had to abort his lap and unfortunately ended the session in P14, with the used tyre time. Still, the performance has been slightly better than we expected, so we will do all we can in the Sprint tomorrow to progress both cars forward."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spielberg here.