Mexican GP: Unpredictable qualifying for Williams Racing
By Williams Racing
October 29 2023
After coming away from FP3 with a very encouraging result the Williams Racing Team was quite positive for qualifying for the 2023 Mexican GP. But by the end of the session this optimism had disappeared as both Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant would struggle in the session. For Logan his reasons were down to things like being hampered from leaving the pit lane as well as a yellow flag that saw him fail to set a time. For Alex he had thought that he had made it into Q3 but would have his lap time deleted finishing 14th. Despite this Alex was at a loss as to why he had suffered such a significant loss in performance from one session to another. Not starting as high up as they had expected will make Sunday's race difficult but you just never know that the conditions may see a return to their FP3 pace.
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Williams Racing
Mexican GP Qualifying Review |
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Logan Sargeant:
"Unfortunately, this afternoon went wrong for us. Going for that
last lap everyone wanted to stop in the pit lane for about a minute and
lose loads of tyre temp and then there was impeding on the lap and
yellow flags. I never really had a fair chance to set a lap. I was at
the wrong place at the wrong time. We should’ve got into Q2 with a clean
run. In hindsight, we needed to go early and get ahead of all that mess.
It’s frustrating as we have a quick car this weekend but didn’t put a
time on the board. The race pace wasn’t too bad yesterday, so we’ll try
and move forward tomorrow." |
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Alex Albon:
"I don’t think it was track limits, however I might be wrong. Based
on the external view of the shot, it looked to me that my rear tyres
were still on the white line, however it is what it is. It’s really
frustrating but what’s more frustrating is the lack of pace in
Qualifying; I was four of five tenths slower than I was in FP3, losing a
lot of grip, so I almost had to do tyre management to keep the tyres
alive into sector 3. It was the same from FP1 to FP2 and now FP3 to
Quali, so we really need to look into it. We’ll look to tomorrow and see
what we can do." |
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Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance:
"Despite only minor changes to the conditions and the setup, we had a
very different performance between the two sessions. The performance was
strong in FP3 but in Qualifying both drivers struggled to find the same
level of grip that they had exploited in FP3. Added to the difficulties
at the pit exit, Qualifying was much more difficult than we had hoped.
With both drivers having laps deleted for very fine track limit margins,
14th and 20th was the best we could do today. We need to understand what
happened between FP3 and Qualifying.
Racing in Mexico is different to every other circuit that we visit and
there is still a lot to play for tomorrow: car and tyre management will
potentially dominate the day and provide numerous opportunities to race.
We would like to have started higher up the grid, but we can still race
hard tomorrow." |
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Track: Autódromo Hermanos
Rodríguez, Mexico |
Lap Length: 4.304km |
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Pos |
Driver |
Team |
Q1 |
Q2 |
Q3 |
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14 |
A Albon |
Williams Racing |
1:18.828 |
1:19.147 |
- |
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DNF |
L Sargeant |
Williams Racing |
- |
- |
- |
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