In Mexico, AlphaTauri was still the big winner and was able to improve by two places in the World Championship with Daniel Ricciardo’s seventh place, but the qualifying in Sao Paulo was over for the two drivers after Q1. Yuki Tsunoda was 16th, 0.044 seconds short of the cut, while teammate Daniel Ricciardo was only 0.006 seconds behind in 17th.
“It’s frustrating because we were definitely faster than what we showed and there was potential for Q2 and maybe even Q3, but we didn’t get it right on the last lap,” Ricciardo said angrily.
He says he didn’t have the tires in the right window at the start of the lap: “I went into Turn 1 too hot and we lost a lot of time in the first sector,” he explained. “And from then on we were in a little spiral.”
But the Australian also tries to see the positive: “On the other hand, I’m happy with the improvements I found on the car compared to the morning,” he says. “Tonight I’ll look at how we can get the performance out of it for the rest of the weekend.”
Teammate Tsunoda also says that he feels like he didn’t get the most out of the package. “In the last lap I didn’t have a clear ride, which affected my lap time,” said the Japanese. “Our pace wasn’t right today, so we have to look at what happened and see how we can improve.”
Formula 1: AlphaTauri doesn’t have enough pace
However, he knows that Brazil is a sprint weekend and AlphaTauri can’t do much about the set-up. “So it’s about getting the performance out of the car for tomorrow and Sunday. We will do our best to improve as much as possible.”
For AlphaTauri, the exit in Q1 is a clear setback after the upward trend of the last few weeks. “We didn’t have the most successful Friday,” admits lead race engineer Jonathan Eddolls.
He also reveals that the team had not prepared particularly well for qualifying in training. They tried out various set-up options and primarily used the hard and medium tire compounds. They wanted to save the softs for qualifying.
But we didn’t actually have any major problems there – apart from the usual lack of grip on a green track. “We felt the car was reasonably competitive,” he says.
But the feeling was deceptive: “Although we were able to improve in each of the runs, we didn’t have enough pace today to get into Q2, which was frustrating considering the gap was less than a tenth,” says Eddolls.
“We knew we wouldn’t be quite as competitive as we were in Mexico, but we expected more than what we achieved today. We will go through the data, try to understand what happened and make changes to the car within the parc fermes to improve it for tomorrow’s Sprint Shootout.”