Pierre Gasly rues contact with Esteban Ocon at F1 Japanese GP re-start in an already difficult scenario for the French outfit.
Even though they brought updates to F1 Japanese GP, Alpine still is far behind in the pecking order. While Ocon made it inside Q2, the pace is still not there to fight with the midfield teams who were in contention for points.
The team goes to races with optimism of points but in Japanese GP, it was lost for Gasly after his contact with teammate Ocon on re-start. The former tried to pass the latter on the line, but hi left side touched with the right and there was damage.
They lost about 33 points of downforce and Gasly was being passed by other cars lap after lap. There was damage to Ocon’s car too as they put the collision as a racing incident. “We had an amazing first start,” said Gasly. “I managed to move up three positions. Second start was very good too. I managed to pass Esteban and go alongside Yuki.
“Then unfortunately I got sandwiched with Yuki turning left, Esteban turning right and Esteban touched me and took the whole left side of my floor off the car. So, I was down. The team thinks like a bit less than 40 (33) points of downforce. After that it was pretty much game over. I was trying to stay out there hoping for another red flag to change it.
“But that was it, pretty much. A race incident. But it cost us a lot. It was a very, very long, very long, very difficult afternoon,” summed up Gasly, as Ocon added: “It was very tricky, we picked up some damage at the start which obviously didn’t help. We then tried something on strategies, to try and be ahead of the other cars every time but we were not able to keep them behind.
“So, it was a good test for us this weekend to see where we were exactly. I think probably progress for us in terms of qualifying, we did a good one yesterday but in the race we are back to where we were in Bahrain. There are some similarities between here and Bahrain so we need to look into that.”
Despite the shortcoming, Gasly tried to take some positives out of the weekend after the pre-planned updates they brought. “On the positive side is, we had the first set of upgrades, which apparently delivered what we expected,” he said. “So that was very positive. We just need to crack on with these new parts and upgrades on the car.
“I know the team’s working really hard. And we just need it. Obviously Japan was not a very representative result considering what we had. There was more to do. But still overall, we know we still too slow and we got to find more performance. They’re working really hard on it. I appreciate they managed to get this first upgrades this weekend. And now we need to get the next set as soon as possible,” summed up Gasly.
Here’s the clash between the two: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2024-japanese-grand-prix-verstappen-keeps-the-lead-ahead-of-perez-on-the-race-restart.1795654597944996643.html
Here’s how F1 Japanese GP panned out
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