Pierre Gasly says Alpine have ideas on where to improve but notes it is early days for him and the team in F1 2023.
It hasn’t been a start like Aston Martin for Alpine in F1 2023, but they have scored in both the races to be ahead of the rest of the pack behind the Top 4 teams. For all of the testing, the actual pace of the French outfit couldn’t be ascertain.
Even in Bahrain, they didn’t look to threaten the top end teams but in Saudi Arabia they did look likely to. However, they didn’t look to have any in the main race where they had to settle for positions behind them and ahead of the rest of the pack.
While Esteban Ocon has conceded that Alpine cannot be happy with what they have, teammate Gasly concurred the same. He says the team have an idea for where to improve, but it is still early days for them and the hope is to push on to get there.
“I’d be lying if I said no,” said Gasly to media about wanting more in Saudi Arabia. “Personally, I thought that we would have a bit more pace to join the fight ahead of us. And unfortunately, we just finished where we are at the moment, eighth and ninth; it’s pretty much just where we are. I think we were 10 seconds behind the Ferraris.
“Mercedes were definitely faster than we thought. And that’s just what we’ve got at the moment. And we need to analyse what we can do better. On the positive it was my second race with the team, the second time in the points and things sort of were slightly more consistent throughout the weekend.
“But still stuff to work on. I think generally I felt very good on Saturday morning, but things got a bit trickier in qualifying, and again in the race I struggled a bit with the same thing. So we are reviewing everything. But overall, I guess it was only the second race, so it’s all about building up and learning and putting things together as fast as possible.
“We sort of have our ideas on where we need to improve. It’s still early to make a very strong conclusion on what and why. But generally, we know what to improve,” summed up Gasly, who has two points results to show but it isn’t enough to break into a better position which he would have hoped for.
Here’s Esteban Ocon on Alpine not being satisfied
Here’s McLaren pair and Alpine pair on Saudi Arabia weekend