It was a complicated Friday for Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas with Cadillac in the Netherlands. Both drivers finished the Formula 1 Dutch GP Sprint qualifying at the back of the grid, while the team looks for solutions to problems identified during the session.
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Perez was only 21st and highlighted that a steering problem, present since FP1, affected the car’s behavior. According to the Mexican, the fault made the car seem ‘asymmetric’, but the team has already understood the source of the difficulty and hopes to fix it before the next activities.
“It was a challenging Sprint qualifying, mainly because of the steering problem we have been facing since FP1, which made the car seem asymmetric. We understand what is happening, so we hope to solve this tomorrow and take a step forward,” said Perez.
Bottas finished 20th and assessed that his session was relatively smooth, although the strategy of doing three laps with only one cooling lap may have contributed to a loss of performance at the end, when the tires overheated. The Finn also stated that Cadillac expects to be in better condition to deal with brake problems on Saturday.
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“We decided to do three laps with a single cooling lap, and looking back now, maybe we lost a bit at the end with the tires overheating, but other than that, it was a fairly smooth session,” he added.
Marc Hynes, Cadillac’s competition operations director, explained that the team prioritized Hard tires thinking about Sunday’s race and tested different strategies with the two drivers: “We had a clean session in Zandvoort. We chose to prioritize the hard tires for Sunday’s race and used some different strategies with Valtteri and Checo, both with similar results,” he said.
Hynes added that Cadillac is close to Williams and Aston Martin, and intends to use the Sprint race to gather more information, especially given the forecast for more varied conditions on Saturday.
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