Soft tyre trouble
After scoring points in seven of the first eight races this season, Williams managed to bring home just a single point across the Grands Prix of Barcelona and Montreal. A negative trend that, based on the outcome of Friday’s two free practice sessions, risks continuing in Austria. At the Red Bull Ring, particularly during FP2, both Grove cars slipped down the timesheets.
Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz ended the afternoon session in 16th and 17th positions respectively, both reporting major difficulties in extracting performance on the soft tyres. It’s a concerning situation ahead of this afternoon’s qualifying session, and the team will need to find solutions during FP3.
Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz’s comments
“We’re a bit confused,” admitted Albon at the end of Friday. “Things are not terrible, but they’re not great either. We need to understand the wind changes. We know we don’t like certain types of wind, and they might have affected us negatively. Also, we’re fine on the harder compounds, but when we switch to softs we fall back. We have to understand why. We’ll need to experiment a bit in FP3. The track will be much hotter on Saturday, which means we’re starting from scratch anyway. I’m still confident—if we can make the tyres work, I think we’ll have good race pace.”
Carlos Sainz expressed similar views: “Overall, I think our performance was encouraging despite the FP2 times,” said the Spaniard. “We struggled to put together a clean lap on the soft tyre, but I felt very competitive on the mediums and hards. Compared to other teams, we’re struggling to maintain grip during the soft-tyre lap. We’ll focus carefully on this issue. Our race pace looks solid, so we’ll try to find answers for the soft compound and aim to improve over the weekend.” – the former Ferrari driver concluded.
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