Audi F1 came very close to a place in the top 10 during the Sprint qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix: Nico Hülkenberg missed out on qualifying for SQ3 by 15 thousandths of a second.
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Despite this narrow elimination, the German driver believes that the result remains positive for the team : “It’s a shame to miss SQ3 by such a small margin, but overall, eleventh place remains a solid result. In SQ2, I lost radio contact with the team, so I had to manage part of the lap on my own, which made things more complicated.”
Beyond this incident, Hülkenberg is satisfied with the sensations offered by the car: “Other than that, the feeling with the car has been good since this morning. We seem to be well-placed again in the midfield battle, which is encouraging. It’s very tight on the track, so we’re going to use what we learned today and aim to progress tomorrow.”
A more complicated Friday for Bortoleto
On the other side of the garage, Gabriel Bortoleto had a more difficult day and could do no better than fourteenth place after a session disrupted by several technical issues: “This Friday was a bit tricky for us. We encountered some problems during free practice that reappeared during sprint qualifying, which put us in difficulty.”
The Brazilian also highlights the specificity of the Shanghai track, which still requires time to adapt: “Of course, it’s a different type of circuit from those we’ve experienced so far, with various types of corners, and we are rediscovering how our car behaves.”
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The Sprint to collect data
With a 100 km Sprint race awarding points to the top eight, Audi hopes to take advantage of the event to gather as much information as possible before the main qualifying and the Sunday race.
“Regarding tomorrow’s sprint, we’ll see what we can achieve, says Hülkenberg. It’s obviously a fairly short race, but it will still be longer than my Australian Grand Prix! We will make sure to resolve all the issues occurring behind the scenes in order to approach qualifying in better conditions and give our best.”
For Audi, this Chinese weekend represents another important step in learning about its car, as the midfield battle looks particularly tight at the start of the season.
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