Franco Colapinto has produced impressive results for Williams since making his Formula 1 debut at the Italian Grand Prix. Except for his first race weekend in Monza, where he qualified P18, the young Argentinian has always managed to make it out of Q2, even making it into Q3 in Baku where he qualified a superb P8.
During qalifying for the Mexican GP, however, Colapinto failed to make it into Q2, finishing the session in 16th. He was just under 0.4s slower than Alex Albon.
The reason for the not-ideal result appears to be a late set-up change following FP3 that left Colapinto struggling with his FW46.
“Yeah, completely the wrong way. We had changed on set-up after FP3 and it felt completely off.
“The rears were very weak, couldn’t combine, I was rotating in every corner and it just felt really bad. We need to try and recover tomorrow but I think it’s difficult to have the balance right now.
“It feels very off, so we’ll see what we can do, but difficult at the moment.”
The changes to the set-up were made after FP3, which Colapinto puts down to Williams feeling they hadn’t gone “the right way” with the previous one. This left the Argentinian with no time to test out the set-up ahead of Qualifying, explaining the struggles and leaving Williams with little options to fix as the car is now under parc fermé.
“Yeah, maybe. We just felt that we didn’t go the right way. We need to understand what we can do for tomorrow and try to fix it and help the car for the race.”
After making steady progress over the course of the last four rounds, qualifying in P16 felt like a setback for the 21-year-old, who is now looking to move forward during today’s race.
“Yeah, it was clearly a setback. Since my first lap of quali it didn’t feel right and lap 2 balance was even worse.
“We’ll need to try and understand what we can do better but it’s difficult today, very difficult day. We need to try and find the pace tomorrow and try to go forward.”
