Williams ended Saturday at the Formula 1 Chinese GP weekend with mixed feelings, advancing in some areas but still facing significant challenges in terms of car performance.
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Team principal James Vowles highlighted discrete progress with Carlos Sainz: “We found a better direction with Carlos overnight. They are small steps, but they are steps in the right direction. We need to see what we can do with Alex over the next 24 hours to provide him with a better car than he had today. Still, these qualifying sessions remain painful because we are simply not where we want to be. There is a work program already underway that will bring substantial changes. For now, we need to keep our heads up and extract everything the car can give in each session,” he stated.
Meanwhile, Sainz was satisfied with his evolution, even starting in P17 for Sunday’s GP: “I am very happy with my lap today. We made great progress this weekend and managed to put the car in a better window for this session. I still feel that mileage is missing to unlock more performance, but I will value the positive, as we maximized everything we could today. We are still far from where we want to be, and tomorrow will be another challenging race, but it is another learning opportunity as we try to extract the maximum from this package and continue evolving,” he added.
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Alex Albon, who will start in P18, highlighted the difficulties faced: “Unfortunately we couldn’t solve our main problems, and the car didn’t react as it should have in the Sprint race and the qualifying session today. We made many setup changes this weekend, testing various things, but we still haven’t found the sweet spot. We thought this track would reveal our weaknesses more than Melbourne, and it remains a learning curve for us, but we are giving everything as a team. We will have a long engineering debriefing tonight to discuss balance options and what we can do to maximize our performance for the race,” he completed.
Williams is now concentrating efforts on technical and strategic adjustments to improve the performance of both cars in the Chinese GP race.
