REPORT: Day 1 in Miami

Formula 1 action makes its third visit to Miami for Round 6 of the 2024 World Championship, but it was a frustrating day for our drivers at Williams Racing.

With the return of a Sprint weekend format meaning there would be just one practice session on the Friday morning, precious minutes were lost when the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc spun out to herald the red flag early in the day.

Thereafter, Alex and Logan were able to put some decent laps in on the hard tyres, before some push laps on the softs to bring the session to a close.

Sprint Qualifying brought little joy unfortunately, as neither driver was able to get out of SQ1. Alex briefly rose to P16 before his best time was deleted for track limit violations, relegating him to P20.

Logan meanwhile, at his home race, could only reach P19. Focus will switch to the Sprint tomorrow, when we’re all hoping the boys can battle up the grid!

Logan Sargeant reflected on Day 1 by sharing: "We had good pace in that session with a lot of potential, but I had a huge snap in Sector 1 which ended any chance of progressing.

"Unfortunately, in Sprint Qualifying you only get one set of tyres. We’ll see how the Sprint race goes tomorrow."

Alex Albon continued our reaction by commenting: "We tend to struggle a little in Sprint Qualifying sessions when using the harder compounds; we also changed quite a bit between FP1 and Qualifying and unfortunately, the gamble didn’t pay off.

"The things we changed were in the right direction, including a few aero pieces but they weren’t quite what we expected and ultimately, we over-compromised.

"We’ll wait until the Sprint race, then change the car setup and hopefully that will improve things."

Sven Smeets, Sporting Director, summarised our Friday by saying: "Evidently, we’re quite disappointed with the result in Sprint Qualifying.

"We made a number of set-up changes between FP1 and SQ but unfortunately, they didn’t pay off.

"We will use the Sprint race in the morning to gather valuable information so that we can improve the whole package for Qualifying and the Race on Sunday."