Pierre Gasly sees Racing Point and Mercedes as more closer to each other than the AlphaTauri and Red Bull Racing association.
While the Racing Point RP20 was the headline-grabbing F1 car of testing due to its W10-esque design, it was not the only machine which resembled one of 2019 car. Of the others, the most notable were Haas and AlphaTauri.
The former seems similar to the Ferrari SF90, while the latter looked much like the Red Bull RB15. And while AlphaTauri’s challenger is similar aesthetically to last year’s Red Bull, Gasly believes it is less similar to the RB15 than the RP20 is to the Mercedes W10.
The Frenchman also happens to have extra knowledge about the RB15, due to the fact that he drove it for the first half of last season. “I don’t think AlphaTauri-Red Bull looks as close as the Racing Point looks from the Mercedes,” said Gasly.
“But no, I think of course we tried to find philosophy and put on our car what works for others and we look at what other other teams are doing as well, but no, I think generally it’s a good improvement compared to last year, just an evolution of the car we had last year.
“I don’t feel it’s massively different. Like if we are changing completely, but just everything aero, mechanical just everything feels slightly better. I’m sure there is still more to come that we need to a bit explore with a different setup and already was good.
“We found the different direction compared to last year. So hopefully there’s even more performance to find out.” Gasly also spoke about the areas which their new car could stand to improve, as well as those where it excels already.
“I think for sure there are many, many areas we’re still exploring, so there were things we tested which were not good, which didn’t feel good. There were some other things that were quite surprising and were quite positive and quite good.
“So, I think, we still need to figure out. Of course it’s a new car and there are new parts compared to last year. The positive thing was that straight away this morning the car felt decent. And I think we found some good directions for the next test.
“We can improve everything, you know, the tyres are a bit. They are the same, but the way we use them now is different with the way we need to operate them before we put them on the car. So there are a lot of things we need to get on top but I think we understood a couple of things which is positive.”
Here’s what Racing Point said about RP20
Here’s the details from first F1 test
The story was edited by Darshan Chokhani