Gasly suffered the 'messy' race start he feared

Pierre Gasly felt that he had little to show for his efforts last weekend in Barcelona where his fears of a "messy" race panned out.

Gasly achieved in Spain his best qualifying performance to date with Alpine when he concluded Saturday's shootout with the fourth quickest lap.

Unfortunately, two cases of impeding another driver in the session yielded a cumulated six-place grid drop that forced the Frenchman to start his race in the thick of the mid-field, in tenth position.

But a bit of commotion at the first corner and a wheel-to-wheel encounter with Red Bull's Sergio Perez pushed Gasly off the track and down the order, leaving him chasing from P15 at the end of the first lap.

Despite his best efforts, Gasly's two-stop strategy left him just outside of the points at the checkered flag. However, a piece of good-luck befell the Alpine charger when his former AlphaTauri teammate Yuki Tusnoda was handed a five-second time penalty that moved Gasly up to P10.

Nevertheless, the 27-year-old was thoroughly disappointed with his day at the office.

"I'm disappointed. Qualifying fourth and finishing P10 is not what we would have liked," he said.

"We lost six positions before the race even started, it always going to be more messy [starting] from the middle of the pack.

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"In Turn 2 we were three-wide with Checo, and I was hoping to avoid contact but ended up in the gravel and losing another four positions, so by the end of Lap 1 I'm 14th and 10 positions from where we qualified, which changes your entire race."

Gasly reckoned that Alpine had "under-achieved" in Barcelona given the form enjoyed recently by Alpine and especially in Monaco where his teammate Esteban Ocon had finished third.

"I managed to come back P10 but it feels like an underachieved result compared to the pace we had," he said.

"On a positive we had a great qualifying, but I do believe we had the pace for the Aston Martin today, I don't think we had the pace [to catch] Carlos."

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