Nicolas Latifi believes Lance Stroll was to blame for the incident in Qualifying that brought the red flag out and heavily damaged the Canadian’s Williams F1 Team car on Saturday in Australia.
Stroll, who had damaged his car in Free Practice Three, passed Latifi on track, before being re-overtaken and making contact in the process. Latifi suffered lots of damage to his car, in what will be a very expensive repair under the new budget cap.
“I’ve seen the video so it’s very clear from my side who is at fault,” stated Latifi, after the incident.
“I let Lance [Stroll] pass as I was told he was on a push lap, which he then must have aborted a corner or so before, which is why he was then going slow. I needed to carry on with my cool down lap and pick up the pace again and get my tyre preparation correct. There was a very big gap to overtake him and, when I got alongside, he turned in for whatever reason.”
“The impact itself was a very small but, because of the way of the impact it has big consequences. There’s a lot of damage to the car so we’ll have to see what the guys can do and I know we have one of the best teams for that.”
“This is the last thing I would have wanted; the goal here was to have a clean weekend and so this is extremely frustrating,” concluded the Canadian.
“We deserved a bit more today” – Alex Albon
Alex Albon failed to make it into Qualifying Two at the Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit on Saturday afternoon, due to the Williams car being interrupted when trying to warm up the tyres:
“It’s frustrating not to make it through to Q2 today. The team have done an amazing job overnight to maximise the performance of the car, so we were in a position to fight for more,” claims the British-Thai driver.
“We’re finding that we need to do a couple of push laps to get the tyres in the optimum window, and unfortunately, my second lap on the second set of tyres was interrupted by the red flag.”
“I felt like we deserved a bit more today, but it’s all to play for tomorrow.”
The start of the 2022 regulations has been tough for Williams, but a clean performance on Sunday could put the British team in the running for some points.
