02/08/2020
NEWS STORY
The historic Silverstone venue produced an event that can be best described as chaotic as safety cars, on-track incidents and a spate of tyre blowouts turned the race upside down. In the end, we took the chequered flag with Antonio and Kimi in P12 and P17 respectively, before the Italian saw five seconds added to his race time, demoting him to 14th.
It was a race that had started positively, with Antonio gaining three places at the start and both cars looking geared for a fight for the top ten: before the second safety car made an appearance, we were showing good pace, keeping up with the Renaults and Ferraris. All that promise, however, turned into little to show for our efforts after the round of pit-stops: once back on track, both cars struggled for pace, eventually losing contact with the point-scoring pack and being unable to capitalise on the tyre issues that affected many competitors in the closing stages.
It was a day of hard lessons, lessons we need to learn - especially more so as we get back to racing on this very track in less than a week's time. Same venue, same cars - we'll need to make a step forward to make sure we improve on the final result
Frederic Vasseur, Team Principal: "It was a disappointing Sunday. We looked good in the opening stages, climbing up to P12, just behind Ocon and Vettel and showing good pace. We were looking on course for a good result until the stops, but in the end we weren't able to make any more progress once we switched to hard tyres. With one more race here in Silverstone, we will need to comb through the data and find the best way to improve our performance for next week."
Kimi Raikkonen: "Not the race we expected, by all means. At the beginning of the race I thought we would have a chance to fight, but after the stops our pace was not enough to keep up with the others. We'll need to see how to improve our performance for next week's race. In the final laps, I had a front wing failure, but that made no difference in the end. I am not sure what happened, we'll need to look into that."
Antonio Giovinazzi: "It's been quite a difficult race but I think we did the most we could. I had a good start and made up a few places, gained another place with a very good pit-stop by the crew but after the second safety car I struggled with pace - and a five-second penalty meant I lost two more places at the end. We hoped to be a bit more competitive, so we will need to look at the data and improve what we can to make a step forward when we race here again next week."
Check out our Race Day gallery from Silverstone, here.