2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Qualifying

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance:The car was quite good this evening and a perfect lap in Q2 might have qualified Alex for Q3, however, he couldn’t quite replicate his pace from Q1 and with a congested midfield, he finished 14th, less than 0.1s from 11th. Logan had good pace on both runs in Q1 and could’ve made Q2, but two track limit errors cost him that opportunity and leaves him in a difficult place for the Grand Prix.

Tomorrow is going to be an exciting end to the season, and we have a lot still to do to cement 7th place. AlphaTauri have a strong starting position, but the race will be long and there are a lot of cars with similar pace. We have a decent race car this weekend and with a good strategy we can fight the cars ahead.

Alex Albon: Our Q2 lap was slower than our Q1 lap, with our tyres just overheating really quickly. When the track goes quicker and you go theoretically faster and faster, by Sector 3 you’ve got no tyres left so you’re having to do tyre management during Qualifying, which is not ideal and makes it tricky. A bit of a frustrating Qualifying but we’ll have to look to tomorrow. Overheating will be a problem in the race, so I think it’s going to be a toss-up between a one or two stop for most. Our long runs seem to be okay, so we’ll do our own race and do the best job we can.

Logan Sargeant: At the end of the day, it’s my mistake to have two laps deleted due to track limits. For sure it’s disappointing but at the same time I’ve been driving well again this weekend. I feel like I’ve had the pace since the first lap on Friday. To have nothing to show from it after Qualifying is a shame. We’ll move on and hopefully try to make up for it tomorrow. The car felt like we were in a good place yesterday on high fuel, quite consistent and reasonable degradation. However, there’s not much data to see the pace of other cars because of the disrupted session yesterday. We’ll give it our best shot tomorrow and go for it.