Pierre Gasly reckons that his charge through the field from fifteenth to seventh in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix was one of Alpine’s “best races of the year”.
Gasly’s solid result was complimented by a tenth-place finish delivered by his teammate Esteban Ocon which ensured a seven-point haul for the French outfit at Interlagos.
Yet the pair’s race weekend had suffered a difficult start due to their subdued performance in qualifying when they failed to make the final Q3 shootout.
Ocon and Gasly had clocked in P12 and P13 at the end of Friday’s session, but adding insult to injury both drivers were handed a two-place grid penalty for separate impeding incidents in the session.
While the result did not meet their expectations, Gasly knew that he would likely always be hard-pressed to make it into Q3 following Alpine’s decision to focus its efforts on optimizing its car’s for race day.
“Yeah, we knew that it was a compromise to accept, especially with such small gaps as I think we missed Q3 by four-tenths,” he explained.
“That’s pretty much what we were seeing from the sims, but then after we knew in terms of racing it was better.”
The approach proved productive along with a pair of blistering fast starts by Gasly in the red flagged event that pushed him up the order at the outset.
He quickly settled into the top ten and diligently managed his two-stop race - and especially his tyres - thereafter, concluding his afternoon in seventh position, six seconds behind Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in six place.
“I think it was one of our best races of the year to be fair,” Gasly said. “It was two very, very strong starts.
“Managed to pass cars on both occasions and second start I managed to get in the gearbox of Sainz and pretty much the whole race I was, you know, keeping up with Sainz, the Aston in front, the Mercedes I had as well.
“And we managed to make the two-stop work, good tyre management, good pit stop, pass George [Russell] and pass Lewis [Hamilton] on the race track, and in the end I was managing to lap like a tenth from Carlos in the whole race.
“So I’m very, very happy, especially because we’ve been struggling a lot on this track since we arrived. So one of the best performances.”
Although Alpine’s display in Saturday’s Sprint had been nothing to write home about, with Gasly and Ocon finishing their short mad dash a lowly P14 and 15, the team had still managed to collect some useful learnings for the Grand Prix proper.
“Yesterday, we didn’t really manage to make it work,” Gasly added. “It was hotter and we were struggling with the temperatures.
“Today, I managed to get in the good train of cars and, yeah, I think we did some good learnings from the tyre management yesterday.
“We saved a new set of Soft for the last stint, which I think was definitely the right strategy to do as a team. And yeah, it was, definitely a very, very strong race.”
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