Williams looked poised to potentially fight for a double-points finish after Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant qualified in the top 10. But the safety car became a curveball for Williams on Saturday night.
“I think everyone who was on the same strategy to me struggled in the midfield, like Pierre (Gasly), myself,” Albon said. “And then the ones that pitted on the safety car were, I don’t want to say lucky, but they were a bit more suited. It was tricky.”
Albon struggled with his tires graining, which he knew how to stop. “But you can’t do it because you’ve got a train of seven cars right behind you. You’re fighting every lap, you’ve having to defend every corner. You’re getting the dirt on your tires. It’s like an endless cycle of pain.”
Sargeant felt the second safety car “honestly killed our strategy” when he was in the middle of his hard tire stint. “Could we have tried to come in and put in a new medium? Possibly. I don’t think it would have made a huge difference.” The rookie sat P12 before the safety car and had a faster pace than a few competitors ahead of him. But “once everyone was able to box for new under the safety car, and we didn’t, it was just really the end of it.”
Strategy doesn’t always play in your favor.
“I don’t think we really did much wrong from a team side, from my side. At the end of the day, we both came around at the end of one lap fifth and sixth, which is where we started,” Sargeant said. “We did our job there. From there, it didn’t go our way.”
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