REPORT: A tough weekend wraps in Imola

A difficult weekend at the 2024 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix concluded with one car in the garage and the other in P17 at the chequered flag.

Starting from P14 and P19, both Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant enjoyed clean starts and settled into their opening stints.

For the second race weekend in a row, we blinked early with Alex to get him off the mediums he started on, boxing on lap nine for hards.

Unfortunately, his front right was not attached correctly, and he had to trundle back around to stop once again, back on to mediums and picking up a 10-second stop-go penalty.

Logan, who had started on the hard, was climbing through the order as those ahead made their stops, soon deploying a superb defence to try and keep his position.

He’d keep Yuki Tsunoda at bay for multiple tours before the Japanese racer and Nico Hulkenberg squeezed through on Lap 27.

Daniel Ricciardo was the next driver to be kept behind before Sarge dived in for his only stop on Lap 31. Logan returned to the circuit and was straight into blue flags and dirty air, making progress difficult.

Alex was now firmly in a de facto test session as we took the opportunity to gather data on the updated car, eventually retiring from the Grand Prix on Lap 51, two laps down at the time.

Our American racer, the sole FW46 on track, delivered some good pace and closed up to a DRS train. He gained two positions as he passed Fernando Alonso, who had stopped, before making a move on Valtteri Bottas before the chequered flag.

“Today was a bit of a struggle,” Logan commented, adding: “There’s very little overtaking here, you get stuck in DRS trains, there’s lots of dirty air which makes it hard to keep the tyres in a good place, and I had a lot of blue flags in the second stint, so it can kind of stack up.

“I think when you look at the windows we had in clean air, the performance was not bad relative to the people around us, so that was a positive.

“I don’t have too much to say about the race except I tried to keep my nose clean and get in the laps.”

Alex continued by sharing: “After the issues we faced with the wheel, we used the race as a bit of a test session to experiment with the brakes on long runs, playing around a bit in these conditions.

“I didn’t feel the issue coming out of the pits, it was only when I took the pit limiter off and felt the vibration that I could tell something was wrong.

“I knew the tyre wasn’t going to fall off as it was only going to a certain point and would stop so it was still safe, but I understand why I got the penalty.

“Whilst today is a little painful, it’s not all doom and gloom. We have a plan, and the midfield isn’t scoring a tremendous number of points, so we’re not falling away too much and can still catch up.

“At this point last year, we only had one point so we are in a similar position. Whilst we don’t have as big of an upgrade coming and our focus is on taking the weight out of the car, we’ll still look to bring minor upgrades.

“We’ll take the learnings we can and move our focus to Monaco.

Sven Smeets, Sporting Director, concluded our Imola reaction by sharing: “Not the race result we wanted today.

“Alex’s race was over after a problem in his first pitstop with the right front wheel. After he served the penalty, we used the rest of his race as a learning for next year and decided to retire him before the end of the race.

“Logan’s stint on the Hard tyre was difficult as he was in a DRS train most of the time. After receiving a lot of blue flags, he found some pace at the end of the race in clean air, and managed to overtake Bottas.

“We will shift our focus immediately to Monaco now and on taking weight out of the car in the upcoming races.”