Audi
It was not to be for Audi after Bortoleto’s heroics in Melbourne. This time, it was Hulkenberg who proved the faster of the duo, thought the German missed out on SQ3 by an agonising 0.015s. Bortoleto was a few places further back, after a scrappy Sprint Qualifying where he ran wide and scuffed up his tyres. However, with both still learning about their Audi power unit, there is a high chance they will move up the order come Qualifying proper.
Nico Hulkenberg, 11th, 1:33.635
“It is a shame to miss out SQ3 by such a small margin, but overall, P11 is still a solid result. In SQ2 I lost radio communication with the team, so I had to manage part of the run on my own, which made things more complicated.
“Aside from that, the feeling with the car has been good since this morning. We look to be right in the midfield fight again, which is encouraging. It’s very tight out there, so we’ll take what we’ve learned today and aim to move forward tomorrow.”
Gabriel Bortoleto, 14th, 1:33.774
“It’s been a bit of a tricky Friday for us. We came across a few issues during Free Practice which appeared again during Sprint Qualifying, keeping us on the back foot. Of course, it’s a different type of track from what we’ve had so far, with different ranges of corners, and we’re discovering once again how our car is behaving. Looking at the Sprint tomorrow, let’s see what we can achieve. It’s a quite short race obviously, and after that, we’ll make sure to fix any issue that is going on in the background, in order to go into qualifying in a better place and give it our best.”
Jonathan Wheatley, Team Principal
“A sprint weekend always brings its challenges for the teams, as there is very little time to learn about the car before going straight into sprint qualifying and then the sprint race itself – the momentum builds very quickly. With these new and very complex cars, arriving at a new circuit means you are constantly learning more about the package — understanding where the performance is and where improvements are needed, lap after lap.
“Considering those challenges, I think the team did a good job between FP1 and sprint qualifying to address the main areas where we could extract performance from the car, and the result was a fair reflection of our pace today. There are still some issues the drivers have been highlighting since the winter, which remain a focus for us as we continue to develop the car. On Nico’s side we briefly lost communication during SQ2, but the team was able to resolve that issue once the car returned to the garage.
“Our priority now is to have a clean sprint race and then see what progress we can make ahead of qualifying.”
