Pierre Gasly calls for AlphaTauri “investigation” into its surprise success

Pierre Gasly finished third in Azerbaijan — Photo: © LAT Images

Azerbaijan Gand Prix

Gasly calls for AlphaTauri “investigation” into its surprise success

French driver wants to understand speed behind podium finish

Will Gray

Wednesday 9 June 2021 14:45

Pierre Gasly has asked for his AlphaTauri team to undertake a full investigation of its performance in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix to discover why it was so good.

Gasly’s Honda-powered machine was fast all weekend on the Baku streets, which combine the tight, slow and twisty sections similar to Monaco with one of the longest straights on the F1 calendar.

After finishing third, the French driver said: “As much as we need to analyse and understand when things don’t go well, I think when it does really well, as this weekend, we need to understand why.

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“The whole weekend we showed such a strong performance and it came a bit out of nowhere. We showed some very strong pace in Monaco. We were coming in Baku wondering if we would be able to show a similar kind of performance.

“From lap one I just felt very confident in the car, very comfortable. I was able to push and we had such good pace all weekend, best quali of the year, P4, couple of hundredths from the first row and [in the race] we had great pace.

“At the moment we don't really have the answer. Obviously, surprises like this are more than welcome more often during the season but I think, more than anything, we need to understand where it came from. “

Engine issue slowed AlphaTauri down

Gasly revealed that the only downside to the weekend was an engine issue, which came on during the race and forced him to try to change his settings to stay on the pace.

Having kept up with the leaders in the first part of the Grand Prix, he was pitched into damage limitation mode and was fortunate to benefit from the demise of title contenders Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen to claim his podium.

He added: “I need to have a look at the data – but I was clearly a pretty big difference with [team-mate] Yuki [Tsunoda], for example, so the guys told me a lot of engine switches to try to limit the damage.

“I was very strong in the second sector and the straight was very hard. From mid-race onwards, we started to lose performance in the straights. That’s when it started to be a bit more difficult for us.”