Cadillac has been going through a challenging weekend at the Formula 1 Chinese GP, but the team points to signs of progress in terms of performance and learning.
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Sergio Perez finished the Sprint race in 19th and will start in 22nd position for Sunday’s GP. He highlighted the positive points of the day, despite the difficulties: “We managed to get more information today and learned a lot in the Sprint race for the GP. Unfortunately, the qualifying session was compromised as we arrived late, lost a lap of time, and a deployment issue cost us a lot of time. I think there was still a lot of potential. It’s early for the team, we are learning every day and I hope that tomorrow we can have a good race with the cars around us and take both to the end,” he concluded.
Valtteri Bottas did not complete the Sprint race, but managed to advance in the qualifying session to 20th place: “My first clean qualifying session, so it’s always a positive feeling. I felt that the last two laps were very good and I managed to extract the maximum from our package. We beat an Aston Martin car (Lance Stroll), and Fernando (Alonso) was only two tenths ahead. There is still work to do in terms of reliability and performance. We will try to take everything we learned today into tomorrow’s race, with the goal of finishing with both cars for the first time,” he added.
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Team principal Graeme Lowdon highlighted the progress achieved: “Today we showed a step forward in performance, which is encouraging. Although neither the Sprint race nor the qualifying session for the GP were perfect, we are closing in on the teams ahead in terms of pace. The goal is to resolve the issues we saw this weekend and ensure that both cars run consistently and reliably. When we achieve that, we will be able to compete at the front of the pack,” he concluded.
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