Gasly makes 'best start possible' to Spa weekend

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AlphaTauri driver Pierre Gasly believes that the team has made the best start possible to its Belgian Grand Prix campaign this weekend.

Gasly was third fastest in the morning session while also conducting aero tests for the team, finishing exactly half a second off initial pace setter Valtteri bottas. After lunch he was bumped down to fifth, but the gap to the fastest time set by Max Verstappen remained almost identical.

The 25-year-old French driver is taking that as an encouraging sign moving into qualifying and Sunday's race.

Read also: Verstappen narrowly tops FP2 but ends session with crash

“I’m really happy to be back racing again after the summer break, particularly at such a great track like Spa," he commented after the end of practice.

"It was important for us to have the best start possible this weekend and I think that’s what we’ve done today, finishing P3 and P5.

"We know the areas we need to focus on going into tomorrow, as of course there’s always some extra speed to find.

"The weather is very interchangeable here in Spa, we’ve seen it today with different conditions," he commented. "We may have rain tomorrow, so we need to be prepared for that as well.

"The baseline we have seems to work and we’re hoping we can confirm that everything is working well in Qualifying tomorrow.”

His team mate Yuki Tsunoda is racing in F1 at Spa for the first time and still finding his feet, although he's driven here before in other championships

He was 15th fastest in the morning and improved to 12th quickest after lunch, albeit 1.286s off Verstappen's top time.

“My main target this weekend is consistency and to build up the pace in the car across the practice sessions," said the Japanese rookie. "I think so far this has gone well.

"We’ve been able to adapt across the sessions to improve our performance. As a team, you can see the pace is there, so I just need to continue improving and gaining confidence ahead of qualifying tomorrow.

"The weather changes here are fairly traditional for Spa, it’s definitely quite difficult to drive, but I have some great memories from this circuit over the last few years."

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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.