A frustrated Pierre Gasly says AlphaTauri suffered its "worst performance of the year" in sprint qualifying as its AT02 car is "just not working" at Silverstone.
The Faenza-based squad has been on the back foot since the action kicked off on Friday, with Gasly struggling in FP1 and qualifying just P12 later in the day.
Unfortunately, F1's parc fermé regime allowed for only extremely limited changes in between the two sessions. Gasly concluded Saturday's sprint event 12th while teammate Yuki Tsunoda was 16th.
"Honestly I think it's our worst performance of the year so far," admitted the disappointed Frenchman. "And it's very frustrating because I know the car has a lot more potential.
"All season we've been strong on pretty much every track. And this weekend, for whatever reason, we are just extremely slow, in the straights, in the high speeds, having a huge amount of understeer. And it's just not working.
"We knew with one session of free practice you have a very small window to change the car. And we tried to make a lot of changes for quali, but you can't go too extreme as well, because you can't change after that.
"But we were slow yesterday, we had issues, and today we had the same issues. Today I could not even attack, I was just trying to stay on track for 17 laps, which is never what you want.
"I could not push, I could not brake, I could not follow closely. And for tomorrow, that's the package we have."
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Regarding the "issues" he referenced, Gasly was at a loss to explain why AlphaTauri is struggling for pace at Silverstone.
"I don't really understand why," he said. "Because as I say all season, we have had many, many different tracks, many different conditions. And after the start of the year, I was confident okay, we should not have this kind of weekend.
"But now we're just slow in the straight, which first of all doesn't make sense, with what we see usually.
"We're slow in the high-speed, which is not what we saw since the start of the year. So there is clearly something that we missed.
"But after FP1 that's the car you have, and you know, even this morning, we had these issues, we can't fix them. And we'll have to fight like this for tomorrow."
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