The Brazilian Sauber driver lost five places on the starting grid due to an accident at the Las Vegas Grand Prix
Brazilian Gabriel Bortoletto He achieved the 14th time in qualifying training for Qatar GB This Saturday in Doha, but starts from 19th place at 1pm (Brasilia time) on Sunday. The pilot Sauber He was penalized with the loss of 5 grid positions due to the incident at the Las Vegas GP. “I can do well in the race,” Bortoletto told Band. “But there is the penalty I have to pay in Las Vegas for the mistake I made there. So, going back there will not be easy.”
Bortoletto managed to advance to Division Two in the dying moments of Division One and was confident of the possibility of achieving a better position. “I thought the car was fine. On the last lap, I made a mistake in Turn 2, where I hit the curb a little bit and I had a big back end there,” he said, who started 13th in the sprint and finished 11th. “The rest of the lap wasn’t too bad,” he added.
The Brazilian explained that the differences are very close at the Losail Circuit. “I saw the difference of two tenths and went from fifteenth to fifth,” he said. In Q2, which determined the top ten’s progression to the final part of the classification, Alexander Albon, of Williams, finished 15th with a time of 1 minute 20 seconds 629 minutes. RB Isaac Hadjar, who will start sixth, clocked 1 minute, 20 seconds and 350 minutes to qualify for the third quarter.
“The car we have for the weekend is this,” said Bortoletto, whose best result of his first season in Formula 1 was sixth at the Hungarian Grand Prix in August. The Brazilian ranks nineteenth in the World Drivers’ Championship standings with 19 points.