Liam Lawson said his qualifying run was spoiled when his DRS flap unexpectedly closed as he accelerated towards the finishing line.
The Racing Bulls driver missed the cut to get into Q2 by 0.125 seconds and was over half a second slower than team mate Isack Hadjar.
“Q1 was alright up until that point,” Lawson told the official F1 channel afterwards. “I don’t really know what happened but I know I had a wheelspin out of the corner and then opened DRS and then it closed again basically. So it’s pretty frustrating, obviously, but it just sucks.”
However his team confirmed it was Lawson’s reaction to the wheelspin which caused his DRS to close. “In the tricky conditions, Liam picked up a little wheelspin on exit from turn 10,” the team’s chief technical officer Tim Goss explained, “resulting in a small throttle lift to keep the car under control causing DRS to automatically close which caused him to lose vital speed on the straight, and cost [him] the place in Q2.”
While Hadjar went on to reach Q2, he admitted he was too cautious on his final run, where he fell short of reaching Q3 by less than five hundredths of a second.
“I had a really tricky session,” he explained. “The first run of Q2 had to be aborted [because] the feeling was not great.
“I felt like I had a strong start to the lap on my last attempt. To be fair, I thought that would be enough and I went a bit too conservative towards the end of the lap and it’s not the right approach and it was not good enough.”
Hadjar will start Sunday’s race from 12th on the grid, five places ahead of Lawson.
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