Alpine endured a tough weekend at the Italian Grand Prix, with both Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon finishing outside the points after a promising performance just a week earlier in Zandvoort.
Despite high hopes going into the race, the team struggled throughout every session and on race day at Monza, facing multiple issues that hindered their performance, leaving the drivers and team searching for answers.
Gasly, who started 14th on the grid, battled with brake issues that first emerged during qualifying. His race went from bad to worse as he fell back in the pack, ultimately finishing in P15 after a challenging afternoon.
Reflecting on his efforts, the Alpine charger shared his frustrations.
“It was a very long afternoon,” Gasly admitted. “I’m very disappointed because I thought that somehow in the race things will get better compared to yesterday, and it was actually worse.
“We had some brake issues yesterday we found out after quali, which carried on this afternoon. The car was bouncing a lot and we just had no grip out there. We finished 30 seconds I think from the top 10, which is not good.
“There is a lot of work ahead of us to understand why… Last week at a very different track we had some pace to fight there, today it was impossible, so [I’m] pretty disappointed.”
When asked if there were any early signs of why the car performed so poorly, he pointed to the brake issues and unexpected bouncing.
“The brakes, we’ve got to fix that because especially on a track like that it makes it very, very hard.,” he said.
“Bouncing, we didn’t have much in the last few events and we had a lot here. Obviously it’s a very specific track with the rear wing we’re running, so a lot to review.”
On the other side of the Alpine garage, Ocon, who ran a different race strategy, fared only marginally better, finishing 14th.
“The Frenchman also had a challenging weekend, with the team trying various setups and strategies in an attempt to salvage something from the race.
“We tried everything this weekend,” said Ocon. “In qualifying we tried to qualify with the new or used tyre – we tried both. In the race we tried a reverse strategy, I managed to stay on the one-stop, on the other side Pierre did a different one."
Despite trying a reverse strategy and making an effort to extract the most from the hard tyres, Ocon acknowledged that none of the approaches yielded the desired results.
“So we need to have a proper look on exactly what was best on the hard tyre to be doing, maybe it was something different,” he said.
“Maybe we should have started on the medium and then gone on the hard and try and hang on there.
“We covered all the ground and unfortunately it was not enough today. We go again next week in Baku and we try to get more results.”
There were, however, a few glimmers of positivity earlier in the weekend, particularly the A524’s improvement in performance from Friday to Saturday.
“I think the positive definitely was the turnover in terms of car performance from Friday to Saturday, which has been very positive,” Ocon noted.
“But we haven’t pointed out exactly what it is, so we need to be on top of [that] before we get to Baku.”
With Alpine leaving Monza empty-handed, the team will need to dig into the data and address the issues that derailed their weekend if they hope to return to form at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
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