Pierre Gasly not too happy with the safety car call in F1 Bahrain GP, as Jack Doohan rues hard tyre stint which cost him first point.
Already on Saturday, Alpine’s Gasly was overjoyed with a fifth place finish which got converted to fourth to start the F1 Bahrain GP. On Sunday, he was on it by staying with the leading pack. He ran well in the points and ahead of some of the key runners who could have scored ahead of him.
For a large portion, he kept the likes of Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Yuki Tsunoda at bay. While the latter two never got close to him as much, the former two did so. The Brit passed him in the pits during the safety car period, while the Dutchman had to work hard.
He was all over Gasly in the last stint and passed him on the final lap to take sixth. The Frenchman had joy of scoring points after a competitive run, but didn’t understand the safety car call, especially to clear minor debrief. He feels there will be talks definitely to understand the call made.
“Trusting the line wasn’t…kind of have mixed feelings because I absolutely hate losing a position on the last lap especially after having worked so hard over the last laps to keep Max at bay,” said Gasly to media. “It is always frustrating but on the other side, once the adrenaline will come down looking back, last week we were not even fighting for the Top 10 and Max was winning the race.
“It just shows how much of a good weekend we have had as a team, highly competitive, quali was amazing, the race was great with good strategy and pit stops, even with that unlucky timing with the safety car where we lost the position to Lewis in the end. We had still a lot of positives to take. When I saw for what it was, I was like I am sure we are going to talk about it.
“At that time I had a nice gap on Lewis and the guys around, it is like we worked all the race and few bits of carbon, which if I am not wrong Yuki had a contact and actually gave 10s additional pit stop time, so it was a nice gain for some guys. Ultimately, that’s racing, we got to get on with it. Even though it didn’t come all our way but we still managed to finish the race in P7 and scored lot of points which is very positive,” summed up Gasly, who felt night and day in Bahrain in 2025 when compared to 2024.
He was lapped by Verstappen last year at the back of the field and in 2025, he was fighting the Dutchma to secure a Top 6 position. “Last year, it was like hitting rock bottom with both cars P19 and P20, Max probably lapped us,” Gasly continued. “It was very different picture this year as we were fighting with him until last lap. I am very pleased with the sort of efforts that the team are putting in and the performance we are able to extract.
“We know where our current weakness is, we know there’s work to do in our car in some areas which do not click, like low speed traction…all these areas we need to improve but overall the performance of the car has massively improved, just thanks to all the people doing the great work at the factory,” summed up Gasly, whose teammate Doohan had two good stints in the points until the last one.
He ran in the points until the safety car period. On the hard compound, he couldn’t keep up with the cars on the soft tyres behind. He was trying to clear Esteban Ocon ahead but the dirty air churned his tyres and he eventually paid the price of losing out to one car and others followed.
From ninth, he dropped to 15th in the end. But a time penalty due to track limits dropped him to 17th in the end. “It was 20 laps too long, I reckon,” said Doohan to media. “It was looking quite good on the soft and the medium, I think we boxed the right time for the hard, bit of bad luck in safety car as the six cars behind us were on the new softs.
“I I pushed quite a lot to keep them behind but once one went through, with no rear tyre, everyone followed and we picked up a time penalty at the end which pushed us back by couple of places. A very unfortunate end to the stint. I was struggling quite a lot with just trying to get Esteban in the slipstream and I think it was Yuki who was 0.8s on the straight, I should be fine with that gap but the next moment I looked halfway down the straight that he is on my rear.
“Once he went through, I was struggling a lot with the rear, you just kind of tumble in the dirty air with the cars behind on fresh soft, have the momentum and you are a sitting duck,” summed up Doohan, who reckons the set-up didn’t work in his favour as he likes more at the nose.
“There’s not significant differences [to Gasly], they are just small steps in quite a number of areas and I like the car a lot more on the nose for sure,” he said. “I think that really hurt me at the end of the stint.”
Here’s how F1 Bahrain GP panned out
