Gasly embarrassed by AlphaTauri's Istanbul performance

Sam Hall
Tuesday 17 November 2020 14:29

Pierre Gasly has slated the Turkish Grand Prix pace of AlphaTauri as "embarrassing" after suffering one of his worst results of the season.

Ahead of the race at Istanbul Park, the Frenchman had finished in the points in six of his previous eight races, with the obvious highlight being his maiden victory in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

While the AlphaTauri has shone in dry conditions this year, the recent weekend clearly highlighted an apparent weakness in the wet as Gasly could only manage 13th after starting last on the grid - 18th as Williams elected to start both its cars from the pit lane - due to a grid penalty.

“The whole weekend was really bad," said Gasly. "We had very poor performance in the wet.

"Honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing because we were so slow with the wets, with the inters because we just couldn’t switch them on. It was the same in quali.

"We took a penalty so [we had] a lot of problems. We need to do better because it was a poor performance from our side since Saturday morning and we need to work for the next races.”

Desperately searching for something positive to take away from Turkey and into the season-ending triple-header, Gasly added: “In the dry it was fine.

"It was obviously very unique conditions which I don’t expect we are going to face [again]. But just for all of us, I think we need to understand what went wrong and what didn’t work.

“We already have some answers from Saturday but we could not make the changes for the race.

"Still, we should have anticipated all these things and I think we could have done a better job. Now it is done and we need to look at the next three races.”

Team-mate Daniil Kvyat was equally frustrated with the weekend after finishing one place ahead of Gasly in 12th.

“I was frustrated to finish P12 because there are no points and so much struggle," said Kvyat.

"I was fighting the car all of the race and finishing with no reward is a bit frustrating. There is not much to do, to be honest. “Our pace this weekend in these conditions, our car wasn’t in the right window so we need to analyse why.

"But it is also understandable that these conditions are extremely rare so it wouldn’t be correct to build a car around these kinds of conditions. We just need to learn from it and understand.”

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