Formula 1 | Albon could aim for Q2 in Monaco: ‘I had no more grip’
Alex Albon was one of the disappointed in Q1, after narrowly missing out on Q2. The Williams F1 driver lost big with the red flag, which left him unable to get his car into as good an operating window as his previous lap, which had tentatively taken him to eighth.
“It’s frustrating, you need to have the car in a perfect window for it to be fast, and on the second lap it was. We were off to a good start, with the red flag we could catch a train tyres. But in the garage, everything cooled down, and I had no more grip in the last stint.” regret Albon.
“It’s frustrating, but we will fight tomorrow. We want rain, rain dances are welcome! If the weather is good, the degradation of the tires is high, so it will be interesting to see. We focus on tomorrow.”
Latifi had “a new car” in qualifying
Nicholas Latifi experienced a difficult qualification, almost a second behind his teammate. The Canadian reveals that he and his team have decided to change everything in the settings of his FW44 before qualifying. Thus, he had to find his marks and his limits during his fast laps.
“Although it’s not the result I wanted, it’s still one of the most enjoyable qualifying sessions of the year. It was very intense, and the most important thing is that we found things that wouldn’t have couldn’t have happened on the car after FP2 and FP3.”
“The car was bouncing a lot and we were in trouble. We understood that it was not normal and we made good progress on that. The car was not yet what it should have been, but it was totally different from what I had in EL1, EL2 and EL3” explains Latifi.
“We want to continue to gain confidence on the track, the driver must make the difference and must be consistent with the car. But everything I had learned during free practice is useless to me and I resumed qualifying saying to myself ‘ok it’s a brand new car’.”
“It’s the session where you want to be the most at the limit and I was discovering the limit, so it was tricky. I did my best, we still have to understand certain things with the car because it made life ten times harder than it should have been. I think there was a lot better to do. It’s disappointing, but that’s Monaco.”