REPORT: Sprint and Quali complete in Austria

Saturday in Spielberg began with the 100km Sprint, with the team opting to start Alex Albon from the pit lane after making some setup changes in Parc Ferme.

After an aborted start, we finally got underway, enjoying a clean start albeit Logan Sargeant lost a spot to Nico Hulkenberg.

By Lap 8, Alex was fully on the back of Zhou Guanyu despite his pit lane start, and our Thai racer made the move on Lap 11 at Turn 3.

He pulled away with ease, setting his sights on the other Sauber of Valtteri Bottas, meanwhile, Logan’s multi-lap defence of Daniel Ricciardo ended on the sixteenth tour.

With four laps to go, Alex sent his FW46 up the inside of Bottas at T3, making it stick by T4.

Into the final couple of laps and Logan had Alex behind him. The two were instructed they were free to race so long as they kept it clean, however they stayed in sequence until the chequered flag.

Post-Sprint, Hulkenberg was handed a time penalty and our duo climbed to P16 and P17 in the classified results.

With data from the Sprint banked, we headed into Quali with some new information but were unfortunately knocked out in Q1, a qualifying session that saw the closest gap between the top 20 cars in F1 championship history.

Each driver had three push laps, improving on every tour but it wasn’t enough to make Q2 - Alex was P16 with a 1:05.736, Logan was P19 with a 1:05.856.

"When you start a Sprint weekend not being in a happy place with the car, you’ve got more catching up to do," Alex shared.

"We’ve been making bigger changes than we normally do all weekend and I think we’ve done a decent job for the most part, however I’m just struggling a lot with balance, especially in Turn 3 and 4.

"My lap for Q2, Lewis let me pass like normal, but I think I got some dirty air and locked up, so this was the difference with it being such fine margins for us.

"Either way, I’m happy with how we turned the car around, however we need to understand where the balance is going ahead of the tomorrow."

Logan continued our Saturday reaction by saying: "It’s been a frustrating day.

"We’ve had such a swing of balance from session to session and we are so reliant on the right conditions to be quick.

"The temperature increased massively today, and we tend to struggle when that happens.

"I was happy with my qualifying lap this afternoon and I pretty much got the most out of it, but the ultimate result is disappointing and starting from near the back is never fun.

"The positive is that we learnt a lot in the Sprint Race today that we can apply tomorrow, also making a change following the Sprint that will hopefully help for the race and move us in the right direction."

Sven Smeets, Sporting Director, concluded our Saturday recap by commenting: "With Alex starting from the last row for the Sprint Race and being unhappy with the car set-up, we decided to make some changes resulting in a pitlane start.

"This has allowed us to gather valuable insights which will help us for the Grand Prix tomorrow.

"For Qualifying, the wind and the temperature picked up and we saw both drivers struggling more with the balance of the car.

"Alex missed out on Q2 by less than a tenth, with the midfield being so tight.

"Tomorrow we will see how the race evolves but with the high forecasted temperatures, it will become a big tyre battle in the midfield."