Alexander Albon says it’s “very clear” where he is lacking lap time compared to Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen after he failed to progress beyond Q2 in Bahrain on Saturday.
While Albon struggled, Verstappen lost out on pole position by 0.056s, with Mercedes locking out the front row of the grid, Valtteri Bottas ahead of Lewis Hamilton’s stand-in George Russell.
Albon asserted that he understands where he is losing out to Verstappen, adding that he was surprised by the feeling within the RB16 on the Soft tyre during qualifying.
“It’s very clear where it [the deficit] is,“ said Albon, who qualified 12th. “I could tell you where I was slow without looking at the data.
“It’s just honestly a little bit of a lack of FP3 running on the Soft tyre I think hurt us because it is so different.
“The Medium and the Hard is actually quite similar in terms of a feeling but the soft is quite different.
“It’s a tricky one and obviously it’s a lesson learned and it’s more experience for my side.
“It just meant that really when it came to qualifying it was tricky to get the low speed and the high speed – Turn 7 and 8, that was really the main area where I lost out – feeling well-balanced.”
Albon explained that he didn’t practice on the Soft tyre during FP3 to give him more sets for qualifying.
“[It was] just mainly to give us more chances in qualifying,” Albon said. “Just to have a smoother run of it.
“We kind of agreed if we could have a good balance on the hard tyre in the beginning of FP3 we could afford to save a tyre just so we had more tyres available to us for qualifying.
“It worked, the hard run in FP3 wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible and on theoretical pace it was actually very strong so we decided to use mediums in the second half of it which maybe hurt a bit more.”
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