F1 Sprint Qualifying, Antonelli pays for a mistake
A mistake to learn from, for Kimi Antonelli: the F1 World Championship leader finishes fifth in the Zandvoort Sprint Qualifying, after a session affected by a mistake in SQ1. In the first minutes of track action, the Bolognese ended up in the gravel at turn 13, which had also caught out Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz in FP1: it seemed like an excursion without consequences, as stated on the team radio with Bono (“No damage detected“). The damage was there instead: 25 points of aerodynamic load which sufficiently explain the two-tenths gap from George Russell’s pole position.
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After the incident, Antonelli was able to react and get the most out of a “limping” W17, finishing ahead of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. And above all, he remains very confident for tomorrow.
Antonelli’s words
“I basically had holes at the bottom, practically“, admitted Antonelli. “When I came back in, they told me there was a loss of 25 points of downforce. They tried to repair it as much as possible, but the damage was definitely still there, so I struggled a lot in the low-speed sections“.
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“I had a bit too much speed entering the last corner, so I lost the rear and went into the gravel. Basically, it ended there and it wasn’t even easy to rebuild confidence in the car. But we are quite close, we will try again tomorrow“.
For the Italian driver, tomorrow’s Sprint at noon will therefore be an opportunity to immediately recover ground. Starting from the third row, Antonelli will be able to count on a competitive Mercedes and achieve a useful result in the F1 World Championship perspective.
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