Audi left the United States Grand Prix with positive signs, but also with the sense that it could have achieved a better result. Nico Hulkenberg finished 11th after an anti-stall issue at the start, while Gabriel Bortoleto advanced from 21st to 13th.
The team principal, Allan McNish, highlighted the pace of the cars and the solid tire management in Austin. For him, both drivers managed to regain positions, but Hulkenberg’s initial setback complicated the quest for points.
The German started 11th, but dropped to 15th after the anti-stall activated unexpectedly. Even with a sequence of 29 laps on soft tires, he could not catch Pierre Gasly of Alpine. Hulkenberg finished 7.439 seconds behind the Frenchman, who had started 10th, and missed the chance to score points for the sixth time this season.
“It engaged the anti-stall, but not instantly,” Hulkenberg explained. “It was very late; I did a few meters, then did a bit of the start and then the anti-stall kicked in, so it looked a bit odd. I need to go back and check exactly what happened or what went wrong, and obviously that put us at a disadvantage, and we passed by the easier cars, and then that put us back where we started.”
“But then I had a fairly large gap to Pierre and to Liam, and we were running the same pace, so it was hard to make up that gap. When you’re eight or ten seconds behind, you do the same things, the gap tends to stay the same, but the gap was the result of that first bad lap.”
McNish stressed that Audi managed to keep up with the pace of the faster Alpine and Racing Bulls cars. The team also opted for a strategy that allowed them to take advantage of tire durability, although the final result fell short of expectations:
“The pace in the car seemed very strong, and if you compare us to the faster Alpine or the faster Racing Bulls, we were right on their tails,” said Audi’s team principal. “We were also catching Gasly at the end, and another strong point was our tire performance—we could preserve the tire, especially the soft, for longer than we did, but we made the strategic call to the opposite approach.”
“So the other positive factor was that both cars managed to whittle the field down, overtake, and extend the gap, so there were many positives. The downside was that one started on the back row, and the other had an anti-stall issue at the start, dropping to P15, so as soon as we entered Turn 1, we were on a recovery mission.”
“In terms of operation, speed, racing and everything else, it was all really good, and we basically reached as far as they could have gone, unless someone retired, and nobody did,” he concluded.
