2024 United States Grand Prix - F1 Sprint Race and Qualifying

Sven Smeets, Alex Albon & Franco Colapinto react after the Sprint Race and Qualifying

Published

20 OCT 2024

Est. reading time

2 min

Sven Smeets, Sporting Director: It’s not the result we wanted today with both cars out in Q1. Both drivers struggled this afternoon with the balance of the car and weren’t very happy with the behaviour on the Soft tyre. On top of that, Alex had a lot of traffic on his last push lap which cost him a few tenths and Franco made a mistake in his last lap so couldn’t improve. We have some work to do at home to try to understand the reasons behind the lack of performance but will now concentrate on the race tomorrow. Our long runs on Friday and our stint on the Medium tyre in the Sprint Race looked competitive, so we’ll see what the race brings tomorrow.

Alex Albon: Obviously, we’ve been trying to recover from yesterday. I had the opportunity during the Sprint to practice and test different setups for a race run with varying levels of downforce, but I didn’t really like it. Ahead of Qualifying, we kept some of the changes while reverting to part of the original setup. Regarding Qualifying, it was honestly quite surprising. The biggest issue we faced was that I came out of the pit lane maybe a lap earlier than everyone else, so when we started our push lap, about nine cars had just come out. I was overtaking a car almost every corner, and there was a lot of dirty air, which makes a big difference here. I’ve been struggling with the car and don’t feel in rhythm with it, and the solutions we’ve tried aren’t working, so we need to dig deeper to figure out what’s going on. Tomorrow, we’ll see what we can do with our strategy and hope for the best.

Franco Colapinto: A tough Qualifying session for the team. We maybe went in the wrong direction with the change we made to the car for Qualifying. I thought we were going to be better, but I had a lot of bouncing in the high-speed and lost the rear very aggressively on my second push lap. We’ll try to understand what happened today and recover for tomorrow’s race.