Pierre Gasly hails F1 Brazil GP as one of his best races of 2023 after the recovery from start of the weekend to end to register solid points.
It wasn’t start that Alpine’s Gasly imagined on Friday of F1 Brazil GP where he qualified outside the Top 10 and was handed a impeding penalty too. The sprint race was bit better as he could fight the cars around, but not enough to get into the points.
But the main race on Sunday made it all for a lackluster weekend until then. He made it through the incident around him at the first start and on the re-start too, he managed to gain places and get himself inside the Top 10 already.
The troubles for Mercedes helped him to gain further to be seventh, not far behind from Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz, whom he could match on lap times. The team opted for a compromise on qualifying to aide in the race which actually worked.
“I think it was one of our best races of the year to be fair,” said Gasly to media. “It was two very, very strong starts. Managed to pass cars on both occasions and second start I managed to get in the gearbox of Sainz and pretty much the whole race I was, you know, keeping up with Sainz, the Aston in front, the Mercedes I had as well.
“And we managed to make the two-stop work, good tyre management, good pit stop, pass George and pass Lewis on the race track and in the end I was managing to lap like a tenth from Carlos in the whole race. So I’m very, very happy, especially because we’ve been struggling a lot on this track since we arrived. So one of the best performances.
“We knew that it was a compromise to accept, especially with such small gaps as I think we missed on Q3 by four-tenths. That’s pretty much what we were seeing from the sims, but then after we knew in terms of racing it was better. In the Sprint race, we didn’t really manage to make it work.
“It was hotter and we were struggling with the temperatures. In the main race, I managed to get in the good train of cars and, yeah, I think we did some good learnings from the tyre management. We saved a new set of Soft for the last stint, which I think was definitely the right strategy to do as a team.
“And yeah, it was, definitely a very, very strong race,” summed up Gasly, who was pleased with the team work where Esteban Ocon didn’t hold him up after recent run-ins between the two. “It was good, I think he struggled a bit more, so we knew at some point we might come together and will be no point to waste any time, it was good work from us as teammates,” he said.
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