2025 São Paulo Grand Prix Sprint and Qualifying

James Vowles, Alex Albon & Carlos Sainz react after the F1 Sprint Race and Qualifying sessions in São Paulo

Published

08 NOV 2025

Est. reading time

2 min

James Vowles, Team Principal: The long and short of it is we're not competitive enough here. We've seen that across two days and two qualifying sessions. It's a very close field but we're not at the sharp end of it. We've tried quite a few different setup directions between the two cars, but I don't think we found the sweet spot yet. Irrespective, this is a race that can throw up surprises, so we need to keep our noses clean on the opening laps and take every opportunity that comes towards us.

Alex Albon: Overall, the Sprint wasn’t great for us. We were not quite able to get points, so I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. Unfortunately, with the incident at the end, I picked up some damage from debris, and we had to work quickly to turn the car around before qualifying. We had to switch from our new floor back to an older one, which I think cost us some performance. I’m really glad Gabi [Bortoleto] is okay though; that was a big crash. Qualifying was then quite tricky. We made some good changes and I think we did make a step forward with the car, but you can't really see it. We still don’t have the balance we’re looking for, and that’s causing us to hurt the tyres. We saw the same thing in the Sprint, so we need to look at that and understand our race pace better because it’s so tight in the midfield right now.

Carlos Sainz: It’s been tough to find performance in the car this weekend. We struggle in these types of longer corners and, even though we’ve been playing around a lot with setup, I haven’t managed to find something I’m happy with and I’ve not been comfortable in the car. Tomorrow the pecking order is quite out of sync, so we’ll see what we can do with strategy to try to get into the points. I’m always more optimistic for Sunday, so we’ll keep fighting until the end.

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