Red Bull's Alex Albon was obviously disappointed to clock in a lowly P12 in qualifying, almost six tenths off Max Verstappen's best time, but the British-Thai racer has a good idea of the reason for the gap.
Albon had clocked in fifth in Saturday's final practice but failed to make the Q3 cut in qualifying a few hours later. A setback he attributed to a lack of running on Pirelli's soft compound tyre in FP3
"It’s very clear where it is," said Albon, referring to his performance gap to Verstappen. "I could tell you where I was slow without looking at the data.
"It’s just honestly a little bit of a lack of FP3 running on the soft tyre I think hurt us, because it is so different.
"The medium and the hard are actually quite similar in terms of a feeling but the soft is quite different. It’s a tricky one and obviously it’s a lesson learned and it’s more experience for my side.
"When it came to qualifying it was tricky to get the low speed and the high speed – Turn 7 and 8, that was really the main area where I lost out – feeling well-balanced."
©RedBull
Albon said his lack of running on the soft rubber ahead of qualifying was to save the sets for the grid-defining session.
"We kind of agreed if we could have a good balance on the hard tyre in the beginning of FP3 we could afford to save a tyre just so we had more tyres available to us for qualifying," he explained.
"It worked, the hard run in FP3 wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible and on theoretical pace it was actually very strong so we decided to use mediums in the second half of it which maybe hurt a bit more."
Despite his midfield start, the 24-year-old isn't giving up on securing a healthy bag of points in the Sakhir GP.
"Tomorrow it’s all to play for though and we know overtaking is possible here plus we’re running slightly more downforce than the others so hopefully we’re better on our tyres.
"Our race pace looked pretty strong on Friday and we also have a free tyre choice so we’ll have a long look at that tonight and see what we can do.
"We just need to keep out of trouble at the start and then the plan is to fight through the field."
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