Scuderia AlphaTauri’s Nyck de Vries had his best race of the season so far, starting and finishing in 12th position, but after starting in 9th on the grid, Yuki Tsunoda’s hopes for a good points-scoring race were dashed by brake issues that limited him to 15th.
Nyck de Vries
After lap one, I was on the back foot. It was my mistake, I locked up, and Norris and I touched. This compromised our first stint a little because there were a lot of vibrations on the right front, which affected our pace. When you’re so behind and out of DRS range, you lose so much time on the straights that catching up is tough. I was at the back, alone, so it naturally becomes easier when you’re not fighting as hard as in the middle of the pack when every moment counts. The weekend went a little up and down and started difficult; yesterday, we had a better day, and today was a shame that we lost so many positions on the first lap. We are bringing updates to Imola, so hopefully, we can improve and go again.
Yuki Tsunoda
It was a good race, effort and recovery from the team and myself. I felt like I could extract the most out of the car. It’s a shame I couldn’t score any points, I gave it my all, but I am happy with my performance. It was a tough mental race; there weren’t many breaks because someone was always in front of or behind me. I didn’t expect our race pace to be that strong, but it’s encouraging for future races. I felt confident with the brakes, so I could overtake quite a lot by sending it into the corner. We’ve got upgrades coming to Imola, so we hope they go well to allow us to score points consistently.
FRANZ TOST – Team Principal
First, I’d like to thank the organisers for this fantastic venue and event and all the fans who came to watch. They saw an exciting race, especially with Max Verstappen starting out of position and fighting his way back for another impressive win. As for our race weekend, we struggled initially, and we qualified only for P15 with Nyck and P17 with Yuki.
We chose two strategies for this race; Yuki started on the hard tyre, and Nyck started on the medium. Yuki made a strong start and overtook some cars on the first lap. Then he drove an excellent and competitive race. He overtook Albon twice. He passed Hulkenberg and Bottas and finished in P11, just 1.3 seconds behind Magnussen. Yuki also defended well against Stroll in the last few laps, and I must say that in the race, our car showed a much better performance than in qualifying.
We now have to analyse how to optimise our qualifying pace. Nyck’s start was good, but in the first corner, he crashed into Norris by breaking a bit too late, which caused a flat spot on his tyres and some vibrations. We brought him in to change from the medium tyre to the hard, and the rest of the afternoon was ok for him, but he lost his race with the contact at the beginning. Both drivers had good tyre management, crucial for the car’s overall performance.
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