Albon admits decision to switch to softs wasn't the best in hindsight
F1 News
- GPblog.com
Qualifying for the Portuguese Grand Prix yesterday was a remarkable session. The smooth tarmac allowed many standard rules to be thrown out the window, as Alexander Albon pointed out.
It's not a strange sight to see drivers going out on a harder tire in Q2 during Grand Prix qualifying. Seeing a car run on medium tires in Q3 is a lot rarer, especially when that car also takes pole position.
In retrospect, Alexander Albon said it wasn't such a crazy choice at all. “The mediums were the tire. It's been a weird one this weekend with the oil on the track for whatever reason it's not liking the soft tire. We were struggling a lot, as a team to be fair, in Q1 and Q2 to get the softs to switch on. We tried different warm-ups, didn't really get them to click. We tried the mediums because when we put on the mediums we feel competitive,” explained the Thai driver in a press event hosted by Red Bull.
In hindsight ...
Albon was the first driver to go out on the mediums in Q3 and set a good time before switching back to the soft tires. According to the driver, the latter wasn't a good decision. "I think I would have done a better lap on the mediums personally. Then we went back to the softs for the last run."
"It was okay, my lap felt really good, it's just tricky out there. Tricky to get them to switch on, in hindsight we would have done a build lap just to make sure they were in the window a bit more," Albon concluded .