2023 Belgian Grand Prix

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: Another tricky day, which started very well with Alex executing some very good overtakes and making strong progress. He was able to back this up during the 2nd stint and seemed to have things under control. The third stint was much more difficult with higher tyre degradation than expected, in part due to racing hard with the quicker Alpines. We opted to make a third stop, which led to some more overtaking but a frustrating result.

Logan’s pace and tyre management compared very well to Alex’s but he wasn’t quite able to make the same progress on track in the opening stint, which made the subsequent stints more difficult.

There were some good aspects to today, but the race also highlighted some weaknesses of the car, which we are working on.

Alex Albon: I had a good start today; however, I was almost surprised I fell out of the points in the mid stint, but I was just struggling so much with degradation. The whole weekend was tricky, and the race was just the same. We’re running low downforce, which is fun but going through sector two, it degs the tyres so much. The amount of deg was a bit of a wakeup call, particularly on that Medium tyre. I was having to over-push the tyre to stay in front in sector two and as soon as I tried to manage the tyre, I was immediately under fire from cars behind, so it’s a vicious cycle. I think we need to go away and work out why we struggled so much this weekend, as at the end of the day, this downforce is going to be similar to Monza and that’s our next occasion to likely score points. We’ll need to make sure we learn from this weekend, so when we come back to tracks that suit us, we don’t have this problem again.

Logan Sargeant: It was a really good first 4 or 5 laps. I think we left that first stop too late and pretty much got undercut from where we were to the back, so that was a bit disappointing. Once we were on the Medium tyre, we really struggled with degradation and I don’t think it helped where we came out, as we came straight out into a fight. It was a tough day for both of us, so need to go away and look at why this happened. This weekend obviously hasn’t panned out how we expected, so it’s disappointing but we’ll regroup, take this break and come back refreshed and ready for more.