RB F1 had a tricky weekend in Qatar, with places outside the points despite a rather encouraging intrinsic pace at certain moments of the weekend. The team director, Laurent Mekies, looks back on the performances of the Faenza team.
“This weekend has been very difficult in terms of performance, starting with Friday’s practice. It’s clear that we never had the pace we needed on this circuit. With such a tight field, if you’re a few tenths off your optimal level, you go down considerably in the ranking” Mekies said.
“However, we are not wasting time and we will learn lessons from this event that will be useful to us, not only for Abu Dhabi in a few days, but at this stage of the season also for next year.”
“As for our championship ambitions, it is clear that while we have taken a step forward in recent races, this has coincided with those of our two rivals for sixth place who have done the same, our former driver Pierre Gasly not having shown us no mercy!”
“Our thoughts now turn to Abu Dhabi, where the entire team, on the circuit and at the factory, will be working hard to finish this first year as Visa Cash App RB in the best possible way.”
Tim Goss, technical director of the team, admits that the results were not up to par at RB F1: “We were disappointed. Both drivers performed well at the start and put us in a good position to finish in the points.”
“But like in the Sprint, it quickly became clear that we were far from our usual racing pace on this circuit and that we were struggling to defend our place in the points. Our engineers and our strategy team did their best to rectify the situation, even trying the soft tire compound for the last part of the race.”
“We have a lot of data to process and the technical team will not rest until we understand why we struggled in Qatar. We will do everything we can to deliver a much better race car to the drivers for Abu Dhabi.”
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