Antonelli<\/a> scraped out of SQ1 after getting caught out with traffic. But in the top 10 shootout, their car came alive on the softs. Antonelli grabbed an impressive second row berth, having the beating of his team mate on both flying laps in SQ3 despite next to no experience of this track.<\/p>\nGeorge Russell, 4th, 1:09.495<\/p>\n
“P2 and P4 are good positions for us to be starting from tomorrow. We had strong pace across the whole of Sprint Qualifying and the car balance felt good. That is encouraging for us given how close the fight for P2 in the Constructor\u2019s Championship is. Hopefully we can carry that speed and momentum into the rest of the weekend.<\/p>\n
“The weather forecast for tomorrow shows that we may have rain on the way. Even if that is the case, I am confident that we will have the car underneath us to fight with our rivals and to score important points in the Sprint. From there, it is onwards to Qualifying where we will be aiming for a similar performance as we\u2019ve put together today.”<\/p>\n
Kimi Antonelli, 2nd, 1:09.340<\/p>\n
“Today\u2019s Sprint Qualifying session was really good. SQ1 was a little bit more stressful than expected, as we finished it in P15, but the car felt good and I was confident my lap was going to be good enough to get through. I was able to build from there and find a good rhythm for SQ2 and SQ3.<\/p>\n
“My first push lap in SQ3 was looking really strong but a mistake at turn 10 likely cost me pole position for tomorrow\u2019s Sprint. Many other drivers had moments though, so the conditions clearly weren\u2019t easy; it\u2019s a difficult track too but very enjoyable to drive. P2 is a good position to start from tomorrow and I want to thank the team, both in Brackley and Brixworth, for giving us the car to perform as we did today.”<\/p>\n
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director<\/p>\n
“Today was a very solid effort by the team and drivers. Considering Kimi hasn’t driven here before, a front row position after one hour of practice is very impressive. George also backed that up with yet another decent performance to put both cars in the top five.<\/p>\n
“FP1 was a relatively smooth session but we knew we had work to do. Our performance looked solid on the Hard compound in the early running, but we struggled on the Medium tyre. The engineers did a good job to put the car in the right window for Sprint Qualifying and whilst it’s not perfect, it was clearly an improvement. We saw how difficult it was for every driver to put the lap together in SQ3. George had a moment in turn six on his first push lap; that put a fair bit of temperature into the tyres which ultimately led to a slide in turn 10 and cost him a shot at the front row. Kimi looked set to improve on his final run but locked a wheel into turn 10 which cost him time and led to a messy final turn.<\/p>\n
“All the weekend’s points still lie ahead of us so whilst we’re off to a decent start, we will be taking nothing for granted. We will likely see some challenging conditions over the next two days so we will need to be at our best and ensure we maximise each of the remaining three sessions over Saturday and Sunday.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes Mercedes looked heavier on fuel than some of their rivals in FP1, and as such, their true…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-269210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}