Austrian Grand Prix – Pierre Gasly finished a lap down on teammate Max Verstappen in Sunday’s race at the Red Bull Ring.
While Max Verstappen romped his way to race victory in one of the Red Bulls, Gasly remained mired in the midfield for a significant portion of the race after starting on the Soft tyre. He spent quite a few of the early laps trying to find a way past the Alfa of Kimi Raikkonen, eventually clearing the Finn and going on to finish P7 behind the McLaren of Lando Norris.
With Gasly finishing more than a minute behind his teammate in the same car, a despondent Gasly admitted that the race didn’t start well and that resulted in a snowball effect: “I struggled with the traffic at the beginning and it kind of snowballed from there as we spent more time behind other cars. The hotter everything got, the harder it becomes. I struggled with that and getting past Kimi and other cars around.”
“Then, after the pitstop, I pushed too hard and destroyed the front tyres and just struggled with blistering. It wasn’t the best management on my side so that made the afternoon tough.”
Asked about what he thought the main issue with his race, he said: “The main thing is getting stuck in traffic. If you can’t get through it as fast as necessary, it hurts you and I didn’t have great management with tyres. That made the second stint tough.”
As for whether he can take any positives from the weekend after being comprehensively beaten by his teammate once again, Gasly said he needs to find more speed at the right parts of the weekend: “We’ve shown some more speed, unfortunately that was in practice and not on Sunday afternoon. FP1, FP2 and most of qualifying, there are improvements, but they aren’t as big as I’d like. There are a few things and we’ll keep pushing until I get the performance right.”
“I need to learn from mistakes. Everyone makes them, and that’s not the first or last time. What matters in this sport is making less mistakes, and the main thing is to understand that and not do it again.”
