Japanese GP: Williams Racing qualifying reflects cars pace
By Williams Racing
April 6 2024
Williams Racing would come away from qualifying for the 2024 Japanese GP with Alex Albon 14th and Logan Sargeant 19th. Despite recovering some of the teams programme in FP3 the loss of time in Friday still had an impact especially for Logan. For both Alex and Logan the session saw them struggle with tyre management so their runs were made even trickier to manage. So looking forward to Sunday's race tyre management is going to be an issue which could make both drivers races quite difficult.
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Williams Racing
Japanese Grand Prix Qualifying |
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Logan Sargeant: "After
what happened yesterday and only getting a few laps in FP3 this morning,
it was a pretty good turnaround. We put the car in a good place for
Qualifying considering the limited amount of running and made the right
decisions. I don’t think there was a lot left on the table. A tenth and
a half from Q2 just shows how tight it is. I’m pretty happy with the way
I drove but we’re missing a little bit this weekend as a team in terms
of pace. Tomorrow will be a bit of a degradation race and how we manage
that in Sector 1 will be key. We’ll try have a good start, manage the
race and hopefully that leaves us in a decent spot." |
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Alex Albon:
"We’ve been struggling a lot this weekend and I didn’t feel
comfortable in the car, which is frustrating but it’s where we expected
to be. The way we’ve gone with the car, we’ve made some corners better
but also, it’s made some worse. Around this circuit, you can’t be
sliding because the track is so aggressive and it tears up the tyres.
Normally we can get away with this when the track is smooth, but when
it’s rough like this, we pay quite a big price. I also suffered a lot of
overheating and when you’re having to do tyre management through corners
to save the tyres, it’s tricky to manage. Looking to tomorrow, the car
felt okay in the few long runs we’ve done during FP3, however strategy
is going to be important, so let’s see how we go." |
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Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance:
"In contrast to the disruptions yesterday, today was productive with
both drivers getting through their planned programmes in FP3 and
completing several setup tests. Based on the FP3 experiments we were
able to adjust both cars ahead of Qualifying and improve the setups as a
result.
In Qualifying, both drivers did a good job and although
Logan missed out on Q2, his pace was close to that of Alex, and he did
well to recover from a lack of running yesterday. Alex did a good job
throughout the session and although there was probably a small amount of
laptime that he missed in Q2, 14th is a fair reflection of the current
car pace.
Both drivers found it tricky to manage the tyres even
over a single qualifying lap and so tomorrow is going to be quite a
challenge as they look to balance pace and degradation. The weather is
likely to be dry and warmer tomorrow, which will also affect the
degradation of the front axle relative to the rear, and this will simply
add to the difficulty of racing." |
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Track: Suzuka International
Racing Course, Japan |
Lap Length: 5.807 km |
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Pos |
Driver |
Team |
Q1 |
Q2 |
Q3 |
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14 |
A Albon |
Williams Racing |
1:29.963 |
1:29.714 |
- |
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19 |
L Sargeant |
Williams Racing |
1:30.139 |
- |
- |
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