26/10/2024
NEWS STORY
Sven Smeets, Sporting Director: We knew it would be tight in Qualifying this afternoon, and unfortunately, Franco didn't progress to Q2 as he was struggling with an over-rotating car in Q1.
He will start tomorrow from P16, but his race pace yesterday was strong, so he'll be battling to move up the field. After just five push laps in FP3, Alex put in a great last lap in Q1 and advanced smoothly into Q2. We decided to focus on our out laps in Q2, which paid off, as Alex delivered another strong lap to secure P7 and move into Q3.
He'll start tomorrow's race from P9, which is a great performance considering yesterday's circumstances. The race will be tight in the midfield, but we're confident we have a car capable of fighting for points.
Alex Albon: Q3 was a nice surprise today but I do think we could've been P7. I caught some dirty air from the Mercedes' in the final sector, which could've put us ahead of Kevin and Pierre but we're still in a good position for tomorrow and I'm glad I could deliver P9 for the team and the mechanics who worked really hard to repair the car. Obviously, I haven't had the chance to do a long run, so we won't know until we go out there, but the car feels good and the used tyres we ran on felt okay which is a good judge ahead of tomorrow. We have a lot of our direct competitors around us tomorrow and a few cars out of position but it's not always easy to overtake around here, so we'll try our best to move forward.
Franco Colapinto: IIt was a very difficult Qualifying session today. Unfortunately, it looks like we went in the wrong direction with the set-up change we made after FP3. I was struggling to combine in the corners and suffered from over rotation. We need to try and recover tomorrow but it'll be tricky with how the balance of the car is right now. We'll look to understand the issues and see what we can do to fix it with the tools available. Hopefully, we can try to go forward in the race.