Sprint Race
Alex Albon – P16
Started: P16
Strategy: Medium (Used)
Fastest lap: 1:17.673
Carlos Sainz – P20
Started: PLS
Strategy: Medium (Used)
Fastest lap: 1:17.431
Grand Prix Qualifying
Alex Albon – P16
Q1: 1:13.552
Q2: 1:13.182
Carlos Sainz – P17
Q1: 1:13.574
James Vowles, Team Principal: "It was a great lap from Alex in Q2. That’s all the car had in it today, but it's good to see him across this weekend, really extracting everything we could. With Carlos, just really on the back foot from those first few laps in FP1, but he did a great job today to bring the car back to somewhere sensible with just a few milliseconds between him and Alex. It was also good to see us close the gap to the front of the field. Still much larger than we want it to be, but generally in the right direction.
We've saved some tyres for tomorrow's race, which I think will also be very helpful, and hopefully, weather will come into play, and we can take every opportunity that comes our way."
Alex Albon: “I'm happy with that Q2 lap; we made a few changes that worked between the Sprint and qualifying, so the balance was better, but we're still struggling with pure downforce. I don't think I quite extracted the maximum in Q1, but I definitely did in Q2, and it's probably the most complete lap I've done in a while. We got into more of a rhythm today and were more consistent with our laps, so at least we got one Haas and both Astons behind us for tomorrow. We still need to understand why our starting setup was so far out, because that's something we can build on. With a better setup, maybe we can look after our tyres better too - that's going to matter tomorrow as the deg was high in the Sprint. Overtaking is trickier around Zandvoort, so I'm expecting some tyre games in the race and multiple stops. Let's see what Sunday brings."
Carlos Sainz: “Sprint weekends don’t leave much time to root out problems and we used the Sprint Race pretty much as a practice session, where we tried different things to improve the balance. This afternoon the car was feeling better and the changes we’ve done made it more comfortable to drive. My lap felt decent and we missed out on Q2 by a very thin margin.
Tomorrow we’ll try our best to put everything together and execute a clean race to extract the maximum of our car and see where that takes us."
