Feature

Team Talk - Sunday at Monza

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Alpine F1

Pierre Gasly
"It was a long afternoon, and I am very disappointed as I thought that somehow, we would have more potential in the race compared to Qualifying yesterday. We had a brake issue yesterday which we found out after Qualifying and which carried into this afternoon. The car was bouncing a lot, and we had a lack of grip. We will now regroup and analyse the reasons why we weren't able to be competitive this weekend compared to Zandvoort. We will understand and review the weekend with the objective to come back stronger in Baku."

Esteban Ocon
"We tried everything this weekend to cover all possible scenarios. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to score any points. This wasn't an easy race for anyone, and we need to review and understand which strategy could have been best. We split strategy and I went for a one stopper initially, so stayed out quite long during the first stint and many other teams did the same. I was struggling with the tyres towards the end of the first stint, so maybe Medium-Hard would have worked better in hindsight. On the positive side, there were some solid performance improvements from Friday to Saturday, which we will now need to understand better to be able to stay on top of the issues we were experiencing in Zandvoort. We go again in Baku in two weeks' time, where we need to make sure we can come back to the points."

Oliver Oakes, team principal
"We knew coming into the weekend it would be tough for us to repeat the performance of previous races, fighting in the points, particularly on this specific configuration of circuit. We split strategies with different starting tyres to give us some flexibility in terms of strategy. Esteban did well to make a one-stop work and extend his first stint and we tried a two-stop with Pierre. With both cars finishing within six seconds of each other, there was not much more we could have done today. Ultimately, we lacked the pace today to fight for points. Looking forward to Baku!"

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.