Scuderia AlphaTauri‘s Cheif Race Engineer, Jonathon Eddolls has stated the team have a lot of work ahead of them after making some last-minute changes to the AT03 set-ups during Free Practice Two which cause a significant loss of time on the lap times of the AlpaTauri drivers.
After missing out on scoring double points last weekend at Spa, Eddolls pointed out the different characteristics of the Zandvoort circuit compared to the track at Spa-Francorchamps.
“Coming to Zandvoort, the circuit characteristics are very different compared to the last race in Spa. So, we go from the lowest downforce run this season to the highest. The track always starts quite green here, especially with the sand on the track, so putting the drivers out on the Hards for the first run was challenging for them, particularly with the mild temperatures.”
Eddolls spoke about the quick change of tyres the team made after struggling to get the best performance out of the hard tyres, hoping that the shift in focus to the medium tyre would improve the driver’s grip. However, it seemed to be a fairly lack-lustre change as Gasly encountered some issues, causing him to miss out on the first session.
“We struggled to make that tyre work well so shifted focus quickly to the Mediums, however, we were still lacking overall grip. Therefore, we made big changes to the setup of both cars for FP2. Unfortunately, we lost some time on Pierre’s car with one of the changes, so he lost the first part of the session, but across the two cars we managed to gather good short-run data to piece together the best bits of each setup for tomorrow.
“During the long run, Yuki lost the car when he was hit by a sudden gust of wind whilst on power in the exit of T10, so sadly he beached it and that was the end of our session. Yuki was able to put in a competitive lap on the Soft tyre, which is positive, but generally for the team the performance was not aligned with our expectation, so we have a lot of work ahead of us tonight.”
