“I’m a bit surprised, I didn’t expect it to be this late.”
Yuki Tsunoda, who finished Friday’s free practice at the Bahrain GP in 18th place, said with a shocked expression.
In the test a week ago, I thought we could compete in Q3, so the shock of facing the reality that the team was only competing for 9th and 10th was a huge shock.
Yuki Tsunoda finishes 11th in the opening round
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“Compared to Guanyu Zhou (Alfa Romeo), who I ran with for a long time, I felt a big difference in traction. What’s happening is too big, and I don’t know if I can heal it well and put it together…”
However, engineering director Jonathan Edrus said this was the result of aggressive efforts on the installation side.
“After analyzing the data collected in the test, we tried a setup that had been further developed in free practice. Bringing it back improved the machine balance issue.”
However, since FP3 was held during the hot day, it was almost a matter of chance what the machine would do in the cold qualifying conditions.
Therefore, the AlphaTauris introduced 3 sets of new soft tires from Q1 and performed 3 attack runs. The only “delayed strategy” in the 10 teams told how they were cornered.
Among them, his colleague Nick de Vries could not complete his final attack and finished 19th. On the other hand, Tsunoda, who had shortened the time in all three runs, decided to advance to Q2 with the 8th fastest time. That’s exactly what the team was aiming for.
“I am satisfied with my performance in qualifying. I never thought I would be able to make it to Q2, so from the start I decided to put in 3 sets in Q1, but my 8th fastest time in Q1 was amazing. a positive result, it was difficult in Q2 because we didn’t have any new tires left, but overall I think it was a very positive qualification.”
