Qualifying Notes
- George Russell qualified 14th and Nicholas Latifi 20th for the Bahrain Grand Prix
- George secured yet another Q2 appearance, his ninth of the season so far, before posting a 1:31.218 on his only timed lap of the second session on a set of the used soft tyres
- Nicholas’ fastest lap of the session, a 1:30.182, was set on his last attempt in Q1
Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: George drove very well and made good use of his three new tyres in Q1 to put in a great lap at the end of the session. The car was behaving well in the cooler conditions of the evening session and we were able to get the tyres into their window on the outlap. Unfortunately, Nicholas wasn’t quite able to extract as much from the car today, which is a shame as he was very close to beating both Haas cars.
Tomorrow will be a very different prospect with tyre management being key. Hopefully the changes that we made to the car since Friday will help us and we can have a strong race with both cars.
George Russell: It was a very good session and I am happy to have qualified P14. It was amazing to do a good lap and get into Q2, particularly having missed FP1 and then had tricky sessions in FP2 and FP3. That was all we could hope for as the midfield is too far ahead but to outqualify the Haas and the Alfa, and to capitalise on the issue Carlos [Sainz] had was great. I was on a used tyre for Q2, as we wanted to retain two fresh sets of the medium tyre for tomorrow. The race will be difficult, but we will try our best and do everything we can.
Nicholas Latifi: I was pretty pleased with my lap, but there was a big gap to George so it shows that the potential of the car is there. There are a few set-up differences between us as we went in slightly different directions, so that could account for some of the time difference. We need to look into it and see what we could have done better. Ultimately in the race tomorrow the tyre degradation is going to play the biggest factor in the result. We will try and get on top of that, manage that well and have a good strategy.
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