Alex Albon admits opting not to do the normal soft tyre run in final practice likely contributed to his Q2 exit in Sakhir Grand Prix qualifying
Typically, drivers use the final hour-long session to dial in the cars over a single lap, but today, the Thai driver completed runs on the hard and medium compound instead.
As a result, though his pace on those tyres was pretty strong, when it came to putting on the red-striped softs in the fight to make Q3, he would finish almost four-tenths slower than teammate Max Verstappen in 12th, his worst result since Silverstone.
“I’d say mostly we had a balance in FP3 and then we made some balance changes to fix the car going into qualifying,” Albon explained via Crash.net.
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“Lacking some soft tyre running in FP3 could have hurt us because we got what we were intending to do but with the soft tyre you gain a lot of front grip at the apex basically and it was just tricky to balance because we were missing some front [grip] in some places and having too much front in other places on the soft tyre.
“So it wasn’t as simple as just fine-tuning it with the front wing which is normally the case. So that was it really, it felt like I was pretty happy with my Q2 run one lap and that was it really.”
Asked why he and Red Bull decided not to do the typical soft tyre runs in Q3, Albon replied: “Just mainly to give us more chances in qualifying, to have a smoother run of it.
“We kind of agreed if we could have a good balance on the hard tyre in the beginning of FP3 we could afford to save a tyre just so we had more tyres available to us for qualifying.
“It worked, the hard run in FP3 wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible and on theoretical pace, it was actually very strong so we decided to use mediums in the second half of it which maybe hurt a bit more.”