Stake F1 suffered another disappointment this Friday in Austria. After an encouraging Spanish GP, the team hoped to confirm its renewed performance in Austria, but it was not to be and Valtteri Bottas qualified 18th for the Sprint.
“I did two perfect laps, and even if the second lap was deleted due to track limitations, it wouldn’t have made much difference, since he was only two hundredths of a second faster” said the Finn.
“Unfortunately, we are still lacking lap-by-lap pace. Tomorrow’s Sprint will be a difficult task starting from the back of the grid, especially in a short race with no pit stops.”
“But we will always have the possibility to change the settings afterwards. We will concentrate on using these lessons to improve our performance in qualifying tomorrow and Sunday.”
Guanyu Zhou will start last and recognizes that he did not manage to exploit his qualification: “We used this morning’s practice session to gather information and data, but today’s Sprint Qualifying was a mess for me. I only did two laps.”
“I ended up going wide in the gravel on the first one and hit heavy traffic on the second one. So it was difficult to set a good time as the tires were worn out after the first try.”
“However, looking ahead to tomorrow I think we should have more pace and will be stronger than today – our focus now is on qualifying itself.”
