Franco Colapinto He completed a positive day in the sprint race after a forgettable first day at the Qatar Grand Prix. The Argentine overtook Sergio Pérez at the start from the pit lane in a strange sequence and then overtook the Chinese Guanyu Zhou to close 18th. The competition mainly served him to tune up the Williams for the second round of qualifying, after having a Friday full of complications that even made him start from the pits.
“He fell asleep Czech”The Argentine said with a laugh when they asked him about the unique situation they experienced in the pit road, since they both started from that place to modify their cars before the competition. “No, nothing… Czech was, I don’t know, it seems like I wasn’t looking at the traffic light or something.. Capable was trying to get first. Sometimes the first one takes a little while. I was already ready to leave, my tires were hot and he stayed waiting a few minutes before. It had more grip and at least we recovered a place there,” he added.
The Mexican Pérez also spoke about what happened at the start of the race during the subsequent press conference: “I wanted to open a gap with the people in front to go in clean air for as long as possible and then we stayed there for almost five minutes, then I didn’t have any temperature in the tires. Today it was important to go with clean air to find the car, see where we are. We have changed a lot, in the end we have this disconnection from the balance that is costing us a lot. The main goal today was to go with as much clean air as possible, so going out was slow. And Franco was behind. I had very cold tires because I was there for almost five minutes at the traffic light.. The important thing for us today was to find the balance in clean air for as long as possible.”
“Good, better. The car is much better. It’s a bit annoying because I lost a lot of understanding a little about what to change for the classification. I only had one long run with a lot of gasoline, so it’s complicated now for the qualy to know what exactly to do, but okay. The pace was there, much faster. Happy with today’s car, much better. Let’s see what we can do for qualifying. I broke the front tire quite a bit, we need to improve that a little, but the rest was pretty good,” he said.
“I would think first about qualifying for a while and then about tomorrow. We have to see where we qualify and from then on focus on the race,” he added, with his sights set on the qualy that will take place this Saturday from 3:00 p.m. in Argentina.
“They are all very hard, all very hard (tire) compounds. So I think that makes the jump a little smaller and the tires are so difficult to get up to temperature,” he analyzed about the tires to be used. And he stressed: “
The Argentine rider also managed to surpass Zhou in the 8th lap of the 19 that were run at the Lusail International Circuit and finished 18th, fighting until the end with Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson for the next positions.
