AlphaTauri's Pierre Gasly was once again 'best of the rest' and looking strong in qualifying this weekend in Sao Paulo, putting himself on the third row of the grid for tomorrow's sprint race.
Gasly narrowly pipped Ferrari's Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc to fifth place on Friday evening, and was happy that he had extracted the maximum possible from the car today.
“Today I’m really, really happy. FP1 was quite difficult for me and I struggled a little bit in quali too," he said after the end of the session.
"Every time I went out I managed to find a little bit more, playing with everything inside of the car and making small improvements each time we ran.
"I managed to put it all together when it counted and I think it was a really incredible lap in Q3 today, so I’m really pleased with that.
It’s really amazing for us to be qualifying right behind Mercedes and Red Bull," he added. "It’s a critical moment in the Championship and the team did a fantastic job today.
"Of course it’s only Friday so we’ve got two more days," he acknowledged. "It’s going to be pretty intense, but we’ve put ourselves in the best place possible.”
Gasly's performance got a thumbs-up from the team's chief race engineer Jonathan Eddolls. "Through Q2 and Q3 Pierre was flying," he said.
"He had huge confidence in the car whilst continuing to improve every lap, eventually extracting the absolute maximum possible from the car, with only Mercedes and Red Bull Racing faster than us.
"So far it has been a great effort by the team," Eddolls added. "Sprint Qualifying weekends are typically more intense on a Friday than the normal race format, so we had a lot of preparation work to cover in FP1.
"The focus was on the short-run performance and how to optimise the balance around the lap. "Heading into quali we knew we had some work to do, but believed we had some performance left in our pocket.
"Unfortunately there are no points for today so the focus tomorrow in FP2 will be on long runs in preparation for sprint qualifying.”
Unfortunately Gasly's team mate Yuki Tsunoda wasn't able to make it through to the final top ten pole shoot-out round and still start tomorrow's sprint from 13th place on the grid.
"Yuki struggled more with the car in Q2 and could not match his Q1 time," Eddolls commented. "We need to go away and understand why that was, but it was still a very respectable lap from him."
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