Aston Martin Cognizant F1 Team’s Sebastian Vettel says that the Silverstone-based outfit had to fight hard to score one point in today’s United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin Texas. The four-time world champion carved his way through the field from 18th on the grid to finish the race in tenth place and speaking following the event he said:
“We only scored one point today and we had to fight hard. It was a good recovery after the grid penalty yesterday and when we were in clean air the pace was good. As we expected, it was a difficult race for everybody trying to manage the tyres with the hot track temperatures. I was happy when everybody pitted quite early because we knew we would have a chance by running longer. It gave us fresher tyres at the end, when it mattered, so we could move up into the top 10. It was a good strategy by the team. With a couple more laps, we would have caught [Yuki] Tsunoda, but, from where we started, I think scoring a point is a good result.”
Lance Stroll started the race in 13th place and came home in 12th and speaking following the action he said:
“It was not our weekend. After yesterday’s qualifying, where we were affected by the yellow flags, I was hit at Turn One on the very first lap today. The contact dropped me to the back of the field and I picked up a significant amount of damage on the front wing. It cost us some performance, but we still managed to fight our way up the field. However, points were just out of reach in the end. It is a race to forget, and we will move on and look to come back stronger in Mexico.”
Otmar Szafnauer, CEO & Team Principal commented saying;
Lance was the innocent victim of a clumsy lunge by [Nicolas] Latifi at Turn One on the opening lap, which relegated him to P19 and caused damage to his front wing. From there, although he passed both the Haas cars on lap two, he was never going to be able to recover to a points-scoring position; he did his best and ended up 12th. Sebastian got off to a clean start and was running 12th, just ahead of Lance, for much of the last third of the race. On lap 52 he passed [Antonio] Giovinazzi for 11th, a well executed move, and that became 10th on the next lap when Kimi [Räikkönen] ran wide ahead of him. A solitary World Championship point was scant reward for a fine drive, but our strategists made the right call to go for comparatively late first pit stops and we maximised all the opportunities available to us.