Pierre Gasly says McLaren being fast in F1 Austrian GP is not a good sign for Alpine as they are closing in on Mercedes and Aston Martin.
Although Alpine’s Gasly scored in F1 Austrian GP, it wasn’t the result that they would have hoped for considering the pace shown by McLaren where Lando Norris finished fourth. With the Top 4 teams in a good position, the battle for fifth is on between them.
At the moment Alpine is ahead of McLaren by 18 points but if the updates of the Woking-based team works, it may be difficult for the French team and Gasly thinks it is not a good sign for them even though it is a good motivation step for the F1 team.
“I think there is definitely some positives,” said Gasly. “I think we maximised the race and the points that we could score today. On the other side, it feels like we want more and we want to be fighting closer to that top five. At the moment, we’re just missing these two or three tenths to Fernando and the Mercedes that finished just ahead of us.
“We’ve got to keep pushing, keep developing the package we’ve got. McLaren was extremely fast this weekend, which is not really a good sign for us, but at the same time it should motivate us. It shows that it’s possible to make big gains. It’s all in our hands and I know we’ve got upgrades planned on the next few races, so [I’m] looking forward to seeing what it brings.
“We know what the weaknesses of the car are and where we need to improve at the moment, but it’s not that easy to fix. Hopefully some of these upgrades are going to help that,” summed up Gasly, as teammate Esteban Ocon concurred about Alpine lacking overall pace despite him managing to score in the sprint race.
“First of all, [we were] lacking pace compared to usual weekends,” said Ocon. “I think we struggled a lot more with the car on dry conditions this weekend compared to Montreal or other races like Barcelona, where we were easily in the points. We got some contact with Yuki in the beginning, I don’t think there was damage on the car, but we need to check that exactly.
“And the unsafe release penalty, which is completely our fault as a team, we got it wrong there, we got five seconds. All in all, it made the race quite difficult. We have three days obviously to regroup, understand and come back stronger at Silverstone.”
Here’s knock from Yuki Tsunoda against Esteban Ocon: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2023-austrian-grand-prix-tsunoda-clips-ocon-on-lap-1-to-trigger-safety-car.1770315462908788570.html
Here’s revised Austrian GP results
Here’s how F1 Austrian GP panned out