Team Talk – Sunday in Austin

Alpine

Pierre Gasly

“It's been a disappointing afternoon where we fundamentally lacked performance. Today, we were just too slow. The first stint felt good, I was on the back of Liam [Lawson] in a train of cars and it felt like everything was being managed quite well. Then we pitted onto Softs, had a slow pit-stop, and everything just fell apart from there to the end of the race where I was in a lot of traffic. We have many things to review as a team as it has been very difficult for us to be competitive on Sundays. We will work on it and we go again in Mexico City next weekend.”

Franco Colapinto:

“A tough day and a tough weekend in general for us as a team. On my side, it's not been too smooth and I have generally struggled a lot with the car. We learned a lot session by session and the aim is to just try and be stronger each time we are on track and we will have another chance to do that in Mexico City next weekend. We will keep working hard as a team and just try to find those improvements. At the end, I had slightly fresher tyres than Pierre and saw Gabriel [Bortoleto] attacking. I wanted to keep him behind both of us, so it is something we will discuss as a team and learn from moving forwards.”

Steve Nielsen, Managing Director

“As a team we have a lot to review across the board from this weekend. While our level of competitiveness is still far from being able to score points, it was encouraging to make a small step forward relative to recent events looking at the weekend as a whole. Today, like a lot of teams, we had to adapt our strategy based on the conditions and what we saw on track with the Hard tyre not looking to be a favourable race tyre. On Pierre's side, we covered an undercut threat to box onto Softs, a little earlier than we wanted, and then had a slow pit-stop, which we will review and rectify. Franco was able to extend his Medium run to have a tyre delta towards the end of the race where he caught up to Pierre. We gave the instruction for the drivers to maintain position as we were managing fuel with both cars and the added variable of the number of laps remaining with the leaders in close proximity. As a team, any instruction made by the pit wall is final and today we are disappointed that this didn't happen so it's something we will review and deal with internally.”