Alpine’s poor qualifying performance for the FIA World Endurance Championship season finale, the 8 Hours of Bahrain, was down to not getting the tyre warmup stage correct, Mick Schumacher told Motorsport Week.
“It’s not great,” he said, looking a bit downcast, when Motorsport Week asked the German about how Alpine’s qualifying, and his own in the #36 Alpine A424, had gone.
“There were obviously some points there such as tyre warm up, which wasn’t great. It was a bit impeded by some of the cars around us not being in a great position.
“At that point, just because we were doing something and some people were doing another kind of strategy, by bedding in some tyres, we were a bit impeded, and therefore our tyres weren’t quite ready into the first lap, and then by the second lap they weren’t quite there any more,” he said.
In the opening 20 minute qualifying session for the Hypercars, some teams, including the BMWs and Ferraris, scrubbed in a set of tyres for the race.
After they’d pitted, with new tyres, they proceeded to set their representative qualifying laps.
So, from what the German said, it’s possible cars which had pitted caused Schumacher to not be able to get the tyres into the ideal window to do a quick lap.
“It’s a bit unfortunate, but at the end of the day, we have eight hours tomorrow to make up for it,” he finished.
Schumacher hoping for better race pace
With qualifying not going the way Alpine would have wanted, the focus is now fully on the eight hours in front of them.
“I would hope so!”, the 25-year-old said when Motorsport Week asked if he thinks there’s more pace in the car for the race, when compared to qualifying.
“At the moment, it does seem like it. We’ve obviously focused a lot on just purely trying to make the race work. That’s the biggest focus. We know this track is quite aggressive towards tyres, so that was a big, big focus for us. We actually didn’t really try and prepare anything for qualifying.
“So that turned out to work against us a bit more, but hopefully we’ll be really able to focus on making some positions up. There’s always stuff happening in WEC, so I think there’ll be opportunities for us,” he concluded.
Alpine need to finish ahead of BMW and outscore the German team in order to ensure they finish fourth in the manufacturers championship. The French squad currently lead by three points; each position between fourth and ninth has a three-point gap, so it’ll be a fraught battle.
Schumacher’s closing words when asked about the battle?
“It’ll be tough, but we just have to try and focus on our race.”
