Alpine F1 Faces Challenges Despite Gasly's Progress

Pierre Gasly achieves season-best but Alpine F1 still grapples with internal issues and mixed results.

Pierre Gasly achieved his best qualifying of the season with the 12th fastest time, and the Alpine F1 driver is pleased with his start to the weekend. He noted that he felt better this weekend, but Q2 was frustrating as he encountered issues on the track that he had not experienced before.

“There are positive aspects, as we saw this morning when we finished ninth, we were fighting for points, and this afternoon we were just a tenth from Q3. There is positivity but also work and a lot to understand. In Q1 I had a very good lap time, but I didn’t have the same feeling in Q2. There is work to do, but I am well-placed for tomorrow, which is promising,” Gasly reported to Canal+.

Esteban Ocon was positioned just behind his teammate, marking the first time this year (excluding Sprints) that he has been outqualified by Gasly. Nevertheless, he attributes this to a minor issue encountered during the fast laps.

“What we would like is to be in Q3, but we lost a tenth and a half on the straight. We had an engine issue with interruptions during the fast laps. Given that it’s very tight, with this deficit, there wasn’t much more we could do,” Ocon stated.

“We would have approached the top 10, but I am not happy with this session. It might be the first session of the year where that’s the case, some elements were missing and we need to review how to correct this for the next ones and find a good pace like yesterday.”

“It’s much hotter, we changed the settings and the car was less optimized than yesterday. And there is this deficit that costs us, we need to fix it for tomorrow, but tomorrow we’ll use a different engine mode so it should be fine.”