Japanese GP: Mixed Friday practice for Williams Racing


By Williams Racing
September 22 2023

The Friday practice sessions for the 2023 Japanese GP would see the Williams Racing Team come away with mixed results with Alex Albon finishing an encouraging 7th but for team-mate Logan Sargeant, in what was his first run at the circuit, would finish down in 20th. On top of this wide difference between the two drivers was also the significant difference in the car between low and high fuel runs. Such was the difference that the car would suffer high tyre degredation something that will have to be sorted for the race. 

 
 Williams Racing Japanese GP Friday Practice Review
Sargeant
 

Sargeant 

Logan Sargeant:
"It was really cool to drive in Suzuka for the first time but not easy at all particularly in Sector 1. There’s a lot of work trying to dial in the car. I feel like it’s not easy to get everything you need around here, so it’s a work in progress but a good step forward from FP1 to FP2. From a driving point of view, I need to link the first sector up as it’s where I’m losing the most time. From a car point of view, there’s a few tweaks to try and have a better balance from low speed to high-speed. We’ve experienced quite high deg today and it hasn’t been easy to have a consistent balance throughout the long runs. However, on low fuel runs the grip is high and feels pretty good."

Albon 
 

Alex Albon:
"It was okay today. As we expected, the low fuel pace feels good, it’s the long run pace that we are struggling with, so we need to figure that out as the deg is high. We’re going to go back to the drawing board a little bit; we might need to compromise our qualifying car a little bit for our race car, but let’s see."

 

Robson

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance:
"
We’ve had a good day here in Suzuka. It’s always difficult to find the right compromises here and with the hot conditions, the tyres are under a lot of stress, which is causing high degradation. We haven’t got the trade between low fuel and high fuel pace quite right yet but there are things that we can do to improve that overnight. Logan has driven well all day and as a result, both drivers have got a good understanding of the trades that they can make.
The conditions are likely to remain fairly stable for the next couple of days and so we are in a good position to improve the car. It is going to be close in qualifying and the race will require a lot of management, but we should be able to get ourselves into a strong position."

 
Albon
 
Sargeant
 
Practice Classification Japanese GP:
Suzuka International Racing Course, Japan | 5.807km
 
Driver   FP1 FP2
 
A. Albon   1:32.991 (8th)      1:31.555 (7th)
 
L Sargeant   1:34.212 (19th)      1:32.320 (20th)
Albon
 

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