Team Talk - Sunday in Le Castellet

Lewis Hamilton (GBR) Mercedes AMG F1 W12 on the grid. 20.06.2021. Formula 1 World Championship, Rd 7, French Grand Prix, Paul Ricard'
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Catch up with what all the teams had to say following round 7 of the 2021 season, the French Grand Prix at Circuit Paul Ricard.

Alfa Romeo

Antonio Giovinazzi (ITA), Alfa Romeo Racing 20.06.2021. Formula 1 World Championship, Rd 7, French Grand Prix, Paul Ricard
Antonio Giovinazzi
“Unlike the last couple of races, we did not have the pace to get into the points today. We were good on the single lap yesterday, so we will need to understand what happened today. In the end, it was not an easy race, struggling in the first stint with the hard tyres and then not making enough progress on the mediums. I am looking forward to being back in the car in Austria: different track, different conditions and hopefully a different, better outcome.”

Kimi Raikkonen
“We will need to understand why we couldn’t replicate the good performance we had recently. I had a good start, then we struggled with tyre management, but I think it was the same for everyone: in general, we didn’t really have the speed we enjoyed lately. We had a much better pace when we switched to mediums, but by then we were already a bit too far back and, with all the time we lost to blue flags, we couldn’t make a difference to the final position. We’ll analyse this race and see how to improve for Austria.”

Frédéric Vasseur, team principal
“After two good races in the points and a promising qualifying yesterday, today was a rather difficult afternoon for the team. We made some progress at the start, but unfortunately our choice to go for a reverse strategy didn’t pay off. We started on hards but got caught in a lot of traffic and that cost us quite some time. In the second part of the race, we weren’t able to maximise the potential of the medium tyres as we had to deal with all the blue flags, so we couldn’t really make up any ground. We will learn from this, of course, and come back stronger for the double-header in Austria.”