After a difficult Friday at the 2025 F1 Qatar GP, Alpine’s Pierre Gasly delivered a major turnaround on Saturday, finishing P18 in the Sprint before transforming his pace in Qualifying to secure P9 on the grid for Sunday’s race.
Q3 appearance “a massive step forward” after Sprint struggles
Alpine’s changes to both cars after Friday’s Practice session forced Gasly and his team-mate, Franco Colapinto, to start Saturday’s Sprint Race from the pit lane.
Despite starting from the back, the updates proved beneficial. Gasly used the Sprint to gather valuable data and improve the balance of the A524, converting his P19 finish into an impressive Q3 appearance later in the day.
“Yeah, I must say I’m extremely happy with the work of the team because from yesterday, both cars in the last two positions to today being able to get to Q3 was a massive step forward and the car to drive was so much better.”
Limited preparation time a challenge
Sprint weekends offer only one practice session, leaving teams with minimal time to refine their setups. Gasly admitted that this compressed schedule added to the challenge of extracting performance in Qatar.
“Obviously, on a sprint weekend, it’s always hard to get it right. There’s only one session and I tried to make the best out of that sprint this morning starting from the pit lane and it was very good because I got to a much better place with the car. I felt very confident, I managed to put some very strong laps out there and we were quite far from imagining getting to the top ten before Qualifying.”
The Frenchman explained that he struggled with bouncing on Friday—an issue he had not encountered throughout the season—which left Alpine playing catch-up heading into the Sprint.
“I must say this weekend was a bit of an odd one where I struggled quite a lot with bouncing yesterday. [I] didn’t really have this issue this season so it caught us a bit by surprise and there’s only one FP1. It’s kind of limited running to fix it so it wasn’t great in the qualifying yesterday and we changed a few other things which is fine tuning. But when you look at the gap and how tight it is on a track like that it’s quite a big difference.“
Improvements in the car
Both Alpine’s surprisingly came into the pits during the Sprint Race, which is something that usually isn’t seen during that format of race. But Gasly implied it was his idea to do that, as he knew they weren’t fighting for a points paying position and wanted to gather extra data and confidence for the F1 Qatar GP Qualifying session.
“I was going to take the credit for that one because it was my idea this morning to do that. I was like ok if we’re not fighting for anything at least I’d like to get a feel on the soft and instead of being stuck in Lewis rear wing and not really getting a fair feel of the balance. At least I got a clean lap and I think it gave us confidence going into the quali that we were doing the right things.”
Gasly praised the team’s effort, highlighting how dramatically the car improved between the Sprint and the evening’s Qualifying session.
“You always take it in the end, it was a bit more for the FP3 session but it was definitely a very strong job from the team to give me such a better car tonight.“
