Sauber’s Guanyu Zhou will start tomorrow’s race from the pit lane after breaking his front wing at the exit of turn 10 during Q1.
As the Chinese driver was on a flying lap trying to enter into Q2, he hardly hit the curb at the exit of turn 10 and broke his front wing. That caused him to lose time in the last sector, and he only qualified P19 (last) since he couldn’t improve his lap time.
The issue is that Sauber does not have another front wing of the same spec that Zhou used in Australia. Therefore, he will have to use a different one, breaching the parc fermé’s rule and resulting in a penalty for tomorrow’s race.
Zhou was clueless about how he broke his front wing, as he was sure he didn’t make a mistake on his flying lap.
“I didn’t make a mistake on my lap, I was just driving like every single other lap I did,” he explained.
“I got to the last sector, and suddenly I’m locking up, I’m missing this load and when I crossed the finish line I saw the left-hand side was missing. And I have no idea where that came from because everything was just normal.
“I watched the replay, it came from the vibration wherever from the curb of Turn 10, which is very frustrating to be happening in the most important session because I didn’t really go wide. Very disappointing, of course, otherwise it was a pretty good lap.”