After the Miami Grand Prix, the Alpine F1 Team is on 9th place in the teams’ standings. Next to the drama off track, the sporting side is a struggle too. Pierre Gasly explains that the team got homework to do going into the new race week for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
Tough weekend in Miami for Alpine F1 – No upgrade package in Imola
”It’s been a very tough weekend overall for us as a team,” Gasly said after the race at the Miami Grand Prix and explained the struggle: “We changed a few things after we’d been qualifying a few things on the car that didn’t really work or perform properly. I would say it was a step better, but still quite far away in terms of pace compared to what we showed in the last week.
“So, quite a lot of questions to answer before Imola. And yeah, starting from the beginning we knew it was going to be hard, but mainly in terms of pace, I just feel we’ve been quite off all weekend.”
Asked if there will be any significant upgrade package in Imola, the Frenchman denied: ”The car’s going to be the same, but with that car in Jeddah and Bahrain we’re fighting for points where today we finished very far away from that. Clearly something didn’t really go right this weekend.”
Alpine hoped for rain in the Miami Grand Prix, says Gasly
In the sprint race, Gasly was able to score a point after starting 13th, despite finishing 11th on track. Post-race penalties pushed him up to P8. Qualifying for Sunday’s race was a disaster – only P18. Alpine decided to change the set-up, which resulted in a pit lane start. The 29-year-old saw the chequered flag in 13th position. He explained that they tried to prepare for never-coming rain.
”We just changed a few parts on the car which didn’t look good in Quali. Basically tried a few things, we were hoping the rain would come, so it’s more compromises, but at the end of the day we should still have showed a bit more performance than what we did today. Not too sure why, but clearly we’ve got to figure out how to get that performance back.”
Gasly is 12th in the drivers’ standings with seven points to his name. For the next five races, he will have Franco Colapinto as his team-mate, as Jack Doohan (no points) was sidelined, just after six races.
