Pierre Gasly left 'running with a backpack' amid AlphaTauri woe

Pierre Gasly

Gasly left 'running with a backpack' amid AlphaTauri woe

French driver scored on only six occasions this year

Ian Parkes

Saturday 17 December 2022 15:30

Additional reporting by Ewan Gale

Pierre Gasly has revealed the impact of AlphaTauri's weight issues across the past F1 season.

The Faenza-based team had been tipped for a positive season with Gasly at the helm after securing its best result in F1 in 2021.

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But in the sport's first year of a new regulatory era, AlphaTauri slumped to the back of the grid, finishing ninth in the constructors' standings above only Williams.

Gasly, who makes the switch to Alpine for the new season, put the struggles down to the AT03 being overweight.

But with the budget cap providing a level playing field for teams, it was put to Gasly that there was 'no excuse' for the failings.

"I agree," said, Gasly, speaking in an end-of-season interview with GPFans.

"From my point of view, I'm never going to go against the team and say ‘We haven't been good in this direction and that direction’.

“The potential of the car was great. A big performance limitation we had all season was that the car was around 12 kilos-ish overweight for the entire season. We didn't manage to shut this down.

“This is over three-tenths, three and a half tenths per lap, and the number of times that we got close to the top 10 in qualifying [within] a much finer margin than that..."

Gasly highlights impact of weight issues

Gasly was a standout performer in 2021, with many touting the Frenchman as a potential replacement for Sergio Perez at Red Bull before the Mexican signed a new contract.

But the 2020 Italian Grand Prix winner, who only managed six points finishes from 22 races in 2022, in detailing the impact of the extra weight in the AlphaTauri, explained: “The comparison I make is like running with a backpack.

"Once you carry this weight on every single lap of the race, you're losing performance, but you carry more weight through the corners, you overheat your tyres more.

“It just has this snowball impact which definitely affected us more throughout the year.

“Other teams started overweight, but managed to cut down, and on our side, unfortunately, we didn't make this progress.

“The core of the car was actually good, but we were just giving up too much lap time with this extra weight.”