2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Qualifying

Sven Smeets, Sporting Director: The battle in the midfield has been very tight all year and tonight wasn’t any different. 0.15s divided P11 to P19 and unfortunately, tonight both cars were eliminated in Q1. With the grid penalties we will start at the back of the field but let’s see what we can do tomorrow, as we focused on having a strong race car. We will give it our best one more time in the last race of the season.

Alex Albon: We didn’t quite optimise the lap in Qualifying; there was more on the table, so that’s a bit frustrating. It’s such fine margins out there with one tenth having the potential to move us up four or five positions. We obviously focused on the race car more than the Qualifying car due to the grid penalty, so we’ll see if that pays off tomorrow. As a team, we’ve shown a lot of resilience this year, especially over these last few months and it’s been a huge effort from the factory and the trackside team to get the car in a decent place, but we’ve fallen short on upgrades throughout the year, so we’ve been left behind slightly in that midfield battle. We’re putting our focus on the future and will close out the race tomorrow the best we can.

Franco Colapinto: Unfortunately, it didn’t quite come together for us in Qualifying as after the floor repairs, we lost more downforce than we thought. Losing a chunk of time in a tight field was very costly today but let’s see how it is tomorrow. We’ll try our best to recover in the race despite starting with a grid penalty.