Alexander Albon says he’s happy with his qualifying for the 2019 Bahrain Grand Prix despite missing out on progressing to the final Q3 session.
Albon qualified twelfth with a lap-time of 1:29.513, missing out on a Q3 slot by less than half-a-tenth-of-a-second and for the second time in a row will start ahead of his more experienced team-mate Daniil Kvyat.
“After FP3 I went into Qualifying a bit on the back foot, so we decided to do three runs in Q1 to get me through to Q2,” said Albon. “I only had one lap in Q2, which was a bit scruffy – I made a mistake and went wide in the last corner.
“I don’t know how close I was to Räikkönen but I think we missed out on Q3 because I ran wide, so I’m a bit disappointed with that. However, looking at how the weekend went beforehand, I was happy with how we got everything together for Qualifying.”
Albon will look to score his first points in Formula 1 in Bahrain and believes work carried out by Scuderia Toro Rosso in practice will pay dividends on Sunday.
“In FP2 we looked pretty strong in our race simulations, and there’s even a few things we learnt today that we can take into tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to racing here, especially because this is a track you can overtake on!”