Alex Albon "a sitting duck" as Red Bull suffer tyre problems in Spain

Spanish Grand Prix

Albon "a sitting duck" as Red Bull suffer tyre problems in Spain

Albon finished eighth in the Spanish Grand Prix

Ewan Gale

Monday 17 August 2020 13:09 Updated: 14:56

Red Bull driver Alex Albon said he was left "a sitting duck" by his inability to keep his tyres alive at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Albon started sixth and was on pace with Sergio Perez in the Racing Point before the first round of pit-stops.

From thereon in however, the Thai-British driver struggled to extract pace from his hard tyres, a compound that had been described as "horrific" by Williams driver George Russell earlier in the weekend.

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By the end of the race, Albon had dropped behind both Carlos Sainz and Sebastian Vettel.

“It was a hard afternoon and I’m not happy with my race," Albon said.

"It was really tricky out there and I just didn’t have any grip on any tyre compound. Each stint I was nursing and looking after the tyres but after six or seven laps I just had no grip.

"It was frustrating and the opposite to Silverstone last week. No matter what we did we just really struggled to keep the tyres alive. It hasn’t been an issue this year so we’ll need to look at the data and see the reasons behind it because at the moment we just have question marks.

"I was struggling in sector three mostly, I couldn’t stay close enough to cars ahead so I couldn’t overtake and I was kind of a sitting duck. Now we need to understand why today was so different to last weekend in the race so we can come back stronger and improve for Spa.”

Team principal Christian Horner concurred with his driver's assessment, saying the team will have to "try and understand what created that degradation" given Red Bull have had no issues concerning tyre wear in the previous five races.

"He made a good start," Horner said.

"But he got boxed in at the first corner behind Valtteri [Bottas] and he then seemed to struggle with degradation on all tyre compounds. P8 was the outcome of that and now we’ll need to go through all the information from the race to try and understand what created that degradation on the three compounds of tyre."

Before you go...

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