24/11/2024
NEWS STORY
Fernando Alonso: "The pace of the car was much better in the race for us and it was a nice surprise to be fighting in the points until the last few laps.
"The strategy was good, the pitstops were fast and I felt a little happier with the car in general. But there is no reward for eleventh position, and I think we deserved to score some points tonight. I'm looking forward to getting back into the car for Qatar as we try to find more performance. Also, I would like to congratulate Max [Verstappen] on winning his fourth Drivers' Championship, he has deserved to win this title."
Lance Stroll: "It was a difficult race as I had no radio from the first lap so couldn't communicate with the team. We'd planned to stay on the medium tyre for slightly longer at the start of the race, but I could feel it dropping off quickly and wanted to get on the hard tyre. I just couldn't get that message through to the pit wall. It meant that, when I did come in, the team wasn't prepared for the stop and so it cost us about 20 seconds. We knew it was going to be a tough race, but I think P12 could have been possible without the radio issues causing a slow stop. As a team, we know where we need to improve the car but there's still a lot of work to do to get there. Finally, congratulations to Max [Verstappen] on his fourth Championship title - it's really well deserved."
Mike Krack, Team Principal: "We performed a bit better than we expected this evening in Las Vegas, but there was no reward for our efforts as Fernando just missed out on the final point after a strong performance. Almost everyone pitted twice, but we went quite aggressive with Fernando's strategy [starting on the Soft] and in the end he ran out of tyre life [on the Hard tyres]. This left him defenceless against [Sergio] Perez in the closing laps.
"Lance's race was more complicated because we had no radio communications with him for the entire race. It resulted in a big loss of time when he pitted on lap nine because there was no way for Lance to give prior warning that he was coming in. We had to manage the race via the pit board and couldn't recover the lost time. Even without the radio, Lance did a good job with tyre management and drove a strong race.
"We send our congratulations to Max [Verstappen] for his success this year and for securing his fourth world title this evening. Our attention now turns to Qatar next weekend - a totally different challenge in terms of layout and temperatures. We will keep positive, put this week's learning to good use, and try to come back stronger."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Las Vegas here.