Gasly: Red Bull ‘not getting excited’ despite ‘good potential’

Pierre Gasly says that Red Bull’s strong showing on day one of the second test in Barcelona on Tuesday shows that the team’s 2019 package has ‘good potential’ but insists no one within his new team is getting ‘too excited’ just yet.

The Frenchman’s time of 1:17.715 on Pirelli’s C3 compound - technically the medium compound at this test - was a second quicker than the team managed last week and adjusted to Pirelli’s expected performance delta makes it effectively the quickest lap of the pre-season testing so far.

Despite this, Gasly was quick to calm talk of Red Bull’s progress now putting them firmly in the mix with the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes at the front of the grid.

“I think [the mood within the team] is good but we should not get too excited as well, it’s only pre-season testing,” said Gasly.

“Everybody is hiding [their performance] so we just need to try and focus on ourselves and the program we have but so far it’s been good. We managed to [stick to the plan], do a lot of laps which is good for the engine and also for the car.

“I think we know we have some good potential, but we don’t know what the others are doing at the moment, so we’ll just try to improve in the areas where we feel we are struggling a bit at the moment.”

After Mercedes and Ferrari endured disappointing starts to the second week of testing, Gasly insists he is not paying any attention to Red Bull’s rivals at present.

“I’m not really looking at them, but more looking at the number of laps we did, I think it’s been a really productive week last week and then to start the second week with that number of laps is clearly positive,” said Gasly.

“At the end of the day, we just need to [keep working]. Melbourne is coming pretty fast, but we have still have three more days of testing [to learn] a bit more about our package.”

When asked if he expected Red Bull to be amongst the frontrunners this season, Gasly said that would become more clear in the coming days but was keen to suppress early season expectations of Honda given that their partnership with Red Bull is still is so new.

“Hopefully we still have some [performance] left but I think we’re just trying to push slightly more every day,” said Gasly.

“We still have three more days of testing and I think we’ll see more performance coming but at the moment we’re just trying to put mileage on the car.

“Clearly the target of the team [is to compete with the leaders], but also, we need to stay objective on that. Honda is coming in [to the team] in their first year as our engine manufacturer, so of course, things are not automatic yet.

“We need a bit of time to to get the structure and extract everything from this package but the first few days have been really positive and hopefully, we can keep going like this.”

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