Friday Report: 2023 Austrian GP

A challenging Friday for the team, with Lewis qualifying in P5 and George in P11 for Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton qualified fifth and George Russell 11th for Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix.
With just one hour of running before qualifying and Parc Fermé conditions, FP1 was focused on refining car set-up; Lewis ended the session P4 with George P9.
In a frantic and close qualifying session, both drivers required multiple runs in order to progress from Q1. Both ultimately did so with Lewis P8 and George P11.
Q2 proved a similar, and therefore challenging affair. Lewis made it through in a slightly improved P7 but George, 0.041s shy of the top-10, was knocked out in P11 despite improving on his final run.
Lewis, the Team’s solitary representative in Q3, utilised two sets of new soft tyres on his final run to post a 1:04.819. That put him fifth and heading up the third row on the grid for the Austrian Grand Prix.
Attention now turns to Saturday and the second running of the revised Sprint format.

FP

Lewis Hamilton	34 Laps	1:06.251	P4
George Russell	28 Laps	1:06.696	P9

Qualifying

Q1

Lewis Hamilton	11 Laps	1:05.673	P8	Soft, Soft, Soft
George Russell	12 Laps	1:05.686	P11	Soft, Soft, Soft

Q2

Lewis Hamilton	8 Laps	1:05.188	P7	Soft, Soft
George Russell	9 Laps	1:05.428	P11	Soft, Soft, Soft

Q3

Lewis Hamilton

6 Laps

1:04.819

Soft, Soft

Lewis Hamilton

It was a tough session today, but thankfully we got through it. This track has always been a challenge for our car in the past and it showed again today, so I’ll take P5. It’s a good, strong position to start the race from on Sunday. I’m not quite sure yet, where exactly we stand with our race pace, possibly we’re third or fourth quickest. We’re trying to focus on us and to get around as quick as we can, so we will work hard overnight and try to do better in sprint qualifying tomorrow, depending on weather conditions and temperatures.

George Russell

We weren’t quick enough today and from the first laps in the practice session I didn’t have the best feel of the car. Obviously, it’s challenging going into a sprint race weekend like this, as you just don’t have the time to make necessary changes. We’ll see what we can do overnight going into tomorrow and how we can improve ahead of the sprint qualifying. P11 is clearly not the best starting position for Sunday, but we’ve had some good results starting from further down the field this year so I’m hopeful we can fight our way back during the race.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We’ve struggled for high speed grip today and ultimately that’s where we were losing out in qualifying. George had a tough session; he’s lacked the confidence in the rear to really push and ultimately if we can’t give him that in qualifying he’ll be on the back foot from the start. Lewis had a better session, but the car isn’t fast enough and P5 for him is all we could expect. We’re hoping the long run will be better than the single lap but we’ve got tomorrow morning’s qualifying to get through first and there’s a decent chance that it will be a wet session. We’ve got tonight to have a look into the single lap performance and hopefully we can find a bit more, although we’re limited in what we can tune as we are now in parc fermé.