2024 Australian Grand Prix Practice

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: It has been a difficult day for us with issues in both sessions. Alex lost the car having hit the kerb in FP1, causing a lot of damage to the car, including the chassis. He was unable to run in FP2 as a result. Logan damaged his Medium tyres early in FP2 and so his high fuel work was done on the Soft tyre, which wasn’t our intended plan.

We have a lot of work to do tonight to understand where the performance of the car is, particularly at high fuel. At low fuel, the car is working well, and we know where we can find more time, but we didn’t learn much at high fuel today and so it is less clear what we need to do in preparation for the race. We’ll work through the data that we have and complete some further testing during FP3 to finalise the setup for Qualifying.

Logan Sargeant: There was good grip out there compared to last year but the wind picked up this afternoon, making it a little more unpredictable. Generally, on low fuel, we have a decent car with the good news being that we’re at the fine-tuning stage, however, I obviously lost that Medium tyre on the spin and didn’t get a high fuel run. Despite this, we’re in a good place ahead of tomorrow and there’s still some more to get out of the car. As a team, we’re on the backfoot a bit this weekend but we’ll do what we can.

Alex Albon: It was a tricky session in FP1 and I paid the price for it. I ran a little wide and went up onto the exit curb and bottomed out when I landed, so it’s frustrating. I think we have a car that’s quite quick this weekend, so it’s disappointing to not have been able to participate in FP2. We don’t have a spare chassis and I know the team are working hard on what repairs can be made, so we’ll know more soon.