28/06/2023
NEWS STORY
Nyck de Vries: "I enjoyed the Montreal experience, but as a team, we were lacking a bit of performance on track and we also didn't execute the best weekend on all fronts. Me personally, but also together with the team, didn't always make the right calls and decisions, and that ultimately resulted in an uncompetitive weekend and no points on the board. That is obviously disappointing, but we have to look ahead, and we have two tracks coming up now that I know. We have updates scheduled for Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, so that's definitely something we are looking forward to and I hope that we can have two good weekends back in Europe.
"Spielberg is quite a short track, but actually it's much harder than it looks. You can lose a lot of time if you make any mistakes and it's definitely a track which is hard on the brakes. It has quite a lot of straights, but equally there are four high-speed corners. In search of ultimate performance, the compromise between the downforce levels is not so straightforward: you want to put a bit more wing on, but then you also want a package that is raceable and allows you to fight. Usually that also comes with the penalty of a little bit more sliding when you have less downforce, so then you're a bit harder on the tyres. I think in terms of decisions and compromises, Red Bull Ring is a little bit more difficult than you would think from looking at a map of the track. It's a Sprint weekend and that is certainly much more challenging because there is much less track time, so you've got to be on it straight away. Actually, I like the Sprint format and I think it's cool to have a second race. It gives you a first learning and read on what to expect for Sunday's race, and more action for the fans, more entertainment and a bit more of a show.
"The location is special; the scenery is beautiful and for our team we all experience it as a home race for the Red Bull family. And from my personal perspective, the Red Bull Ring weekend has always been very well attended by Dutch fans, which means there's a lot of orange around the track, so it's going to be an exciting weekend and we will do our best to make everyone proud."
Yuki Tsunoda: "In Canada, we weren't able to put it all together, which was a shame as we probably had the pace to score points. In qualifying, after showing a good pace in FP3, we weren't able to extract all the performance from the car, which isn't normally the case. That put us on the back foot for the race. I tried to recover as much as possible and we knew that we had to be aggressive with race strategy. Maybe we didn't get it quite right, but I feel there are a lot of things we can learn from that weekend, and we won't make the same mistakes in the future.
"Now we come to Spielberg, the Red Bull Ring, which is a track I like, and I scored points there two years ago in my first Formula 1 season. Our focus for Austria must be to have a good car straightaway from FP1 as we have qualifying immediately after that on Friday. You have to be spot-on going into qualifying or you struggle for the rest of the weekend. I did a lot of work in the simulator in preparation for this race and I think this becomes even more important than usual when it's a Sprint event. We tested a lot of things, so the plan is to nail the setup in FP1 and build up confidence straight away. The track layout is tough on brakes, but the team has put a lot of effort into solving issues we've had with this in some races, and we now know how to help them work better. There are really only four hard braking points and I'm sure we'll be better in this area than in past races.
"Officially there are ten corners, most of them are medium and high-speed, so although you still need a lot of load, there are long straights where you want to have as little drag as possible. From my perspective, I think it will be a challenging race weekend that won't be easy, but I'm looking forward to it. The atmosphere in Spielberg will be great, as it's Red Bull's home track, so it would be nice to be able to score points there."