Spanish GP: Tough qualifying for Williams Racing.


By Williams Racing
June 4 2023

Coming off the back of Loan Satgeant damaging his car in FP3 qualifying for the 2023 Spanish GP would turn out to be be a tough session for the Williams Racing Team. In the end we would see Alex Albon finish 18th and Logan Sargeant 20th. Alex would suffer from floor damage, when he was caught out by tricky track conditions with rain having previously fallen on the track leaving areas still wet, that would see him spin off into the gravel and have to run with this damage for the rest of qualifying. For Logan with so little time in his car what with his FP3 issues he could not put a lap together. But despite these issues the sessions leading up to qualifying really pointed to a difficult session. 

 
 Williams Racing Spanish GP Qualifying Review
Sargeant
 
Sargeant 
 

Logan Sargeant:
"Firstly, grateful to the team for turning the car around for qualifying. The first lap back out wasn’t too bad. Everyone wants to get in front starting the last lap, and I had a comprised outlap with the tyres a bit out of the window for that last push, which was frustrating. I’m disappointed but I put us on the back foot earlier on today. Tomorrow’s going to be tricky, but we’ll see what we can do."

Albon

Alex Albon:
"I really like the conditions we drove in qualifying, I normally tend to do well in them, but I just got caught out on my first lap and the damage affected the rest of the session, which is a bit of a shame, but we’ve got some pace. I feel like we’ve used this weekend as a bit more of a test session because of us being a bit more off the pace than normal. I think we’ve focused a little more on the Sunday car which should hopefully put us in a good place tomorrow."

Robson
 

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance:
"We made some large changes overnight to both cars and managed to progress the setup. Fortunately, we were able to complete a few laps during the early part of FP3 to confirm the balance.

Logan went through the gravel at T14 just as the first spots of rain started falling and this did a lot of damage to his car, requiring another stellar effort from the team to get his car ready for qualifying. Meanwhile, Alex had a quick look at the intermediate tyre and was comfortable with his car.

Conditions were tricky at the start of qualifying, but this was an opportunity for us to make some progress and in a clean session Alex was capable of making Q2. This would have been an excellent result but an early trip to the gravel at T5 damaged the floor of his car and he carried an aerodynamic penalty through the rest of qualifying.

Logan had a compressed Q1 session following the repairs to his car. He had a tricky final outlap negotiating the traffic whilst preparing his tyres and couldn’t put a representative lap together.

There may be further rain around tomorrow afternoon and so we’ll look to take advantage of that."

Albon
 
Sargeant
 

Track: Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Spain    

Lap Length: 4.657 km
Pos Driver Team Q1 Q2 Q3
18 A Albon Williams Racing 1:14.063   - -
20 L Sargeant Williams Racing 1:14.699 - -
 
T
 

Bookmark or share this story with: