Pierre Gasly will spent time at Alpine F1 factory to work on next year’s car, as he notes how in January it was clear that they drifted away from the midfield even.
With just six rounds remaining, Alpine has ended up doing somewhat done better than what they set out in January, when Gasly had the first chance to look at the car and already understood that their 2024 car wasn’t good enough to compete even at midfield level, when the idea was to try and challenge the Top 3 teams.
The pre-season test only affirmed their position as they struggled heavy in the first part of the 2024 F1 season. As the season progressed, they did manage to eke out Q2 and Q3 results at odd occasions and even score handy points to be ahead of Williams for good number of races.
But in the last few rounds, they have lost out to Williams, with only Kick Sauber behind them. At the moment, it seems like a difficult task to retake eighth from the Grove-based team, as the focus more is towards the 2025 F1 season, where they eye themselves to be in the midfield at least.
They are assessing what updates they can bring in Austin to see-through the last part of the year. “It’s going to be a step when we have some more upgrades,” said Gasly to media. “But at the moment, we just need to look at the delta. Three races ago I finished ninth in Zandvoort. The last three races, we’ve been absolutely nowhere. So I think we got to be objective about what we do.
“We got to review what we have in our hands. We are clearly the ninth fastest car at the moment. I think there are just the Saubers behind us, and the gap with the guys with the guys ahead is just growing weekend after weekend. So we do need some new parts to come, which is going to come.
“And I know we got the team and actually the people to make the right steps. It’s just at the moment it’s coming too slowly, and season is almost coming to an end. Next year’s car is going to be very different. Got to maximise what we have. This year it’s 13 points. Since January, we’ve been telling that the car was completely out of the window.
“We’ve managed at times to get a P9/P10, but then we need next year to clearly make a big step forward, not even in the midfield, the goal was to try to get close to the top three. We drifted away from the midfield and drifted back, actually, so just need to make sure we put ourselves in a much better position,” summed up Gasly, who noted that he will be spend good time at Enstone to work on the 2025 car, so that Alpine at least have a good base of a car to compete.
“We will be working on next year’s car,” said Gasly. “I am going to spend quite a lot of days at the factory, plan with the team just working on this year’s car, I mean, I think the suffering has been enough this year and as a team we should to do a much better job next year.”
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