Williams’ Paddy Lowe believes the team could have gotten both cars into the second part of qualifying, if it weren’t for yellow flags.
Lance Stroll managed a 1m05.264s lap in the first part of qualifying, enough to put him through to Q2 in P15. But team-mate Sergey Sirotkin could only manage a 1m05.322s, putting him P18 for the Austrian Grand Prix.
Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe believes the Russian was caught out by yellow flags, brought out by the Sauber of Charles Leclerc, and could have improved to follow Stroll into Q2.
“The team did some good work yesterday which allowed us some changes overnight,” Lowe said.
“We made some progress with the balance and stability of the car, which I think we saw today.
“Some great laps from Lance helped get us into Q2, and Sergey could have most probably done the same if Leclerc had not caused a yellow flag on his final lap.
“Overall, we are in much better positions for the race than we were in France, and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve tomorrow in the race.”
Sirotkin, who has only managed to qualify in the top 15 twice this season, also believes his qualifying was compromised by traffic and yellow flags.
“We had the pace to get through into Q2, even with the tiny margins in it, but my out-lap was strongly compromised with the traffic,” he explained.
“Despite this, I was able to improve my time on the first half of the lap, before the yellow flag. After the yellow flag, we had to abort the lap as there were a lot of cars ahead of me.”
Sirotkin is yet to finish inside the points this season, but his hopeful he can match the race pace he showed in FP2.
