Yuki Tsunoda has suffered with aero issues with his VCARB throughout the Spa weekend, and he was still struggling with instability in qualifying.
The Japanese driver came into the weekend knowing that he would be starting at the back of the grid due to a PU penalty for taking new elements, and thus he focussed his running on race preparation.
He made only a token effort in qualifying, trying to ensure that he didn’t stop team mate Daniel Ricciardo from progressing to Q2, and was classified 18th.
After suffering downforce issues on Friday his car was changed for Saturday, but Tsunoda complained that there was still some instability in the wet qualifying session.
“It’s kind of mixed, because we wanted to make sure that we don’t knock out the other side of garage,” he said when asked by formu1a.uno for his thoughts on qualifying.
“And especially in these mixed conditions, anything can happen. To be honest, it was just run, and make sure that all the car is working properly.
“Yesterday we found a quite lot of issues with the floor and the aero package. So we changed everything, to make sure everything was working well, to collect the data. It doesn’t really improve yet, to be honest, I think still there’s quite a lot downforce lost.”
“Instability is the main issue. Obviously, the setup is more towards the towards the dry, but [on Friday] what I had was completely lost in terms of downforce and load across the cars. So first hopefully we can be aligned.” Tsunoda said
Tsunoda confirmed that the team had added wing overnight in the search for downforce: “I think most of the cars suffered with graining free practices. So to avoid graining, we need more downforce.
“But obviously, we can’t obviously put too much downforce. Otherwise you can’t overtake, especially when you want to overtake a lot of cars on Sunday. So it’s bit mixed, but yeah, I think we ended up with good compromises.
“Maybe I need a bit of luck, to be honest, to score points. But anything can happen, so I’ll do my best.”
Meanwhile Ricciardo was as high as ninth in Q1 but slipped back to 13th in Q2 and on the final grid after missing the best conditions at the end of the session.
“We start 13th, but I feel a lot better than 13th,” said the Australian. “And I felt like every time we crossed the line, we were inside the top 10. At times I heard he was saying, P3, P4, so we were competitive.
“And we had some issues this morning, and I didn’t actually get a proper run this morning, so coming into quali, I didn’t really know where we would be in these conditions.
“Then the rain started to come a little bit in that second part of Q2 so we decided to go a bit earlier in case the rain got heavier in the end. So I was able just to improve a tenth or something.
“And in the end, the track didn’t get worse. So running at the end was the place to be, and by that point, we’re back in the garage.”
