Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Racing Bulls left the Barcelona Grand Prix with six more points, but the bigger takeaway was the race-pace drop that limited the team to Liam Lawson in eighth and Arvid Lindblad in ninth as Alpine strengthened its grip on fifth in the constructors’ championship.
Lawson qualified eighth and stayed there in the final result after Franco Colapinto’s penalty dropped him from P8 to P10, while Lindblad climbed from 11th to ninth to complete another double points finish. It was enough to keep Racing Bulls in the fight, but not enough to satisfy a team that had looked stronger before Sunday.
That frustration came from the contrast across the weekend. Racing Bulls had both cars ahead of both Alpines in every practice session, and Lawson reached Q3 for the second straight race. In the grand prix, though, Pierre Gasly got ahead of Lawson through what team principal Alan Permane described after the race in Barcelona as a “cheap pit stop” under the Virtual Safety Car, and Alpine had the stronger hand from there.
Permane said the team came away with “mixed feelings” after a weekend that had promised more. “After a strong weekend, it felt as though we retreated a little bit in the race,” he said. “The Alpines definitely had the measure of us today.”
Lawson struck a similar note when he looked beyond the points finish to the broader midfield battle. “Yeah, for us it's good. It's a long season; we have a lot of races to go,” Lawson said in comments to select media including RacingNews365. “Alpine have had some good races recently and scored some good points. But yeah, if we keep this trend, obviously we had a quick car in qualifying. Hopefully that translates to the rest of the season. I think Barcelona is normally quite a good sign for that, so we just need to sort out the race car.”
The gap in race trim mattered because Racing Bulls had arrived with momentum from two straight grands prix with double points finishes and needed to capitalize on a track that is often treated as a reliable benchmark. Instead, even with both cars scoring, the team remained 16 points behind Alpine in the fight for fifth.
Permane said that qualifying-to-race drop will now be the priority. “We’re going to certainly analyse our drop in pace from qualifying to the race, and that will be a big part of our work this week to identify where we can improve.” For a team that is regularly putting itself in position on Saturdays, that next step could decide whether Racing Bulls can turn its qualifying speed into a sustained push against Alpine.