Spanish Grand Prix – Alpha Tauri’s Pierre Gasly says he’s aiming to make up for missing out on points in Silverstone last weekend, after qualifying P10.
Pierre Gasly will start Sunday’s race in Spain from P10, having made it into Q3 again. The Alpha Tauri made it through, before setting a 1:17.136 on the final run to finish 1.5 seconds away from the pole position time set by Lewis Hamilton.
Having missed out on points in last weekend’s 70th Anniversary Grand Prix after starting from P7, Gasly says he’s aiming to bounce back with a strong result on Sunday.
“I think we can be pleased as a team to get another Q3 this weekend, especially because it was a difficult Friday yesterday and I didn’t feel so comfortable in the car.” explained the French driver.
“We made a good step forward for Quali; I had a good result in Q2 and we decided to keep one more prime tyre for the race. We had only four sets of Softs which meant we had to run with the used tyres at the start of Q2, which wasn’t easy, but we made it so I’m quite happy with that.”
“Q3 was very tight and even if at the end I’m happy, inside myself I’m also a bit disappointed because you always feel like you could have done slightly better and maybe get a few more hundredths out of the car. As for the race, it’s not going to be an easy one tomorrow, but I hope we can score a few points to catch up from the missed opportunity last week.” concluded Gasly.
Guillaume Dezoteux, Head of Vehicle Performance at Alpha Tauri, said more was possible from the car: “Pierre was driving a solid lap until he had big wheelspin at the exit of Turn 10, overheated his rear tyres, and affected the performance of the car in the entire third sector. We need to understand the reason for this mistake and if we could have done anything to avoid it.”
Daniil Kvyat missed out on making it into Q3 by just 0.024 seconds, winding up in P12 at the end of Q2: “This morning I struggled with the car which was not behaving well, so we definitely made good steps going into Qualifying. I’m quite satisfied today as it was a solid session. I think it was a strong lap and P12 is a good position to start the race from, and fight for points starting on fresher tyres. I just hope we’ll have good pace tomorrow and that we can make it work so we can finish in the top 10 again.”
