Pierre Gasly sought no excuses for the mistake that put a premature end to AlphaTauri's final day of testing in Barcelona.
Gasly suffered a crash at the Circuit de Catalunya's Turn 5 in Friday's morning session, the Frenchman locking up his wheels and hitting the tyre barriers, inflicting too much damage to his new ATR03 for his team to resume its session.
"Unfortunately, I locked up my tyres during the morning running and damaged the car, but testing is about finding the limits and we’ve still been able to gather a lot of valuable data over the three days," Gasly explained.
The damage was unfortunately more severe than anticipated.
"Pierre went off during an early baseline run, damaging the car, and despite the best efforts of the team we simply ran out of time to get it turned around and back out for Yuki to drive in the afternoon session, meaning our day ended early," commented AlphaTauri technical director Jody Egginton.
Despite the mishap, both team and driver were happy with their week in Spain.
"The first test here in Barcelona with the AT03 has been really positive," said team boss Franz Tost.
"I think that our engineers have developed a good car, that seems to be both fast and reliable.
"We have managed to complete many laps with both Yuki and Pierre, and I think that we have a really strong foundation for the year.
"Across these three days we have completed 308 laps (1,439.9km) and I think this is a good basis for the next test in Bahrain.
"We’ve collected a lot of data here in Barcelona, which should also help to build up a good correlation between CFD and the wind-tunnel, which should be a proper baseline for future development steps."
"It’s been a productive test," added Gasly. "And I think it’s been very interesting for everyone to see how these new cars behave on track.
"We’ve learnt a lot, every run, about our car and also driving wise I’ve been able to develop how to work with this new car and get the most out of it.
"I think it’s been really good. Obviously, you can’t really look at any sort of performance at the moment, so this test has really been about focusing on myself and trying to get good feedback so the team can understand what you need from the car as a driver, to find more performance.
"I must say, it feels quite different to drive these cars – it obviously is visually but also how it responds too, even the way you get into the corner and braking.
"I’ve been trying a variety of things and fine-tuning my driving to work with the car balance that we have, this is all part of the learning process."
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