RB F1 Team driver Yuki Tsunoda is satisfied after qualifying P11 for Saturday’s Bahrain Grand Prix as he struggled “quite a lot” at the start of the weekend.
However, the Japanese driver said he was “not really setting any target for Q3.”
“We knew everyone’s doing different things and also it won’t be easy for us to perform straight away with our new team.”
He said he “struggled quite a lot with the set-up” he had on Thursday, but he felt better on Friday as “the team did a fantastic job to turn it around to a better situation.”
“Obviously [there is] frustration after missing [Q3 by seven thousands of a second], but good job really.
“It’s not as bad as I thought based on the performance I had [during] testing. FP2 was terrible, but [we’re] consistently having a quite good race performance.
“I still need a bit of preparation, but I think if we maximize [the performance], achieving points is pretty realistic.”
Tsunoda explained that what improved his set-up from a “terrible” FP2 were changes that went in the “opposite direction” from what the team had initially implemented.
“We made quite a lot of changes, actually,” he added. “But I think it’s good that we understand that and we turn it around, [knowing] what’s the wrong direction.
“We’re still in the process of [understanding] properly how to make our car faster.”
The RB driver concluded saying he was not worried about the long run performance of his VCARB1 car, and that P11 was a fair result. However, short-runs seem to be a concern.
“Long run seems good. It’s not the place that I was actually worrying [about].
“I was worrying more about the short run performance. P11… I think we’ll take it. I think [tyre] degradation was a bit high, but I think it was a good run.”
