Aston Martin believes that going in the “wrong direction” with tire pressure caused Sebastian Vettel to fall from third in the final training sessions to a Q1 elimination in the Canadian Grand Prix standings.
Vettel was in the top 10 during training in Montreal, including the two dry sessions on Friday, but starred in FP3, which had rain on Saturday in particular.
The four-time Formula One world champion had high hopes as the track was still very wet when he started qualifying, but instead found the AMR22 not to be unfortunately competitive, as he and his teammate Lance Stroll were unable to advance to Q2.
“What has this been like? So different this morning, so different,” Vettel complained on the radio.
“I had no prey. I felt like my left back was broken.”
Aston Martin believes the cause of the problem was not reducing the tire pressure enough to compensate for the improvement in track conditions.
This was a legacy of struggling to warm the tires on the FP3, when it was colder and wetter, but then suffered the opposite problem in Q1.
“We ran a lot this morning and the pressure didn’t go up very well,” said team manager Mike Krack.
“So we had to do a lot of laps to increase the pressure. And we thought the conditions were pretty similar [for qualifying].
“But we had 20 cars on the track in the afternoon, which were probably drying the track or making it faster, much, much faster than we expected.
“Then we ran out of time. You are there and you try to get the best out of it.
“And if we had achieved Q2, we could have adjusted it in time or made more adjustments. But we ran out of time.”
Krack said Aston Martin had eased the pressure, but realized in retrospect that “we should have gone one step further.”
“We tried this morning to try to learn as much as possible,” he said.
“It simply came to our notice then.
“Because, as I said this morning, we were struggling to get the temperature up. And this afternoon, it was just the opposite.”
Vettel and Stroll will start on the 16th and 17th, earning a spot due to Charles Leclerc’s grid penalty, which means a poor return on the most competitive weekend of the AMR22 season.
In addition to the lack of grip, Stroll was compromised by a yellow flag caused by Carlos Sainz in the first sector of his last lap in Q1.
The good thing is that the car is still more and more impressive since its big update was introduced in Spain and Vettel said that the reason he was so “angry” is that he felt there was a “very good result”. in the letters, “even better.” that dry ”.
“Now I’ve calmed down,” Vettel said. “What’s the point of being angry now?
“It’s one of those days when in a wet session with just one car as you want, you can make a difference.
“And I don’t know what went wrong. So we missed that opportunity.”
Vettel arrived in Canada after his first consecutive points of the season.
He was optimistic he could still keep the race going, but he wanted the team to be sure he understood his problems.
“It’s the same game as always, we’re probably faster than the cars in front of us, but we’re stuck with them from the start,” Vettel said.
“And hopefully we can start well, then we’ll see with strategy.
“You can’t do something completely unexpected and get out first. But we have to be clear.
“First of all, we have to try to understand what has happened, if there is real damage or if we have done something wrong, I don’t know, preparing the tires or the lap.
“And then it turns the page and runs hard. I still think we can move forward and maybe get a point.”