AlphaTauri have modified rear wing to solve Baku DRS problem

In brief

Tsunoda confident DRS problem won’t recur

Tsunoda was shown the black-and-orange flag during Sunday’s race after part of his rear wing flap failed. Speaking to media ahead of this weekend’s race in Canada the AlphaTauri driver said he could “feel slightly different behaviour” at the rear of his car as early as lap three, which eventually developed into a failure.

While he was initially unaware his DRS had failed during the race, and suspected an engine failure at first, Tsunoda said AlphaTauri have now discovered what went wrong.

“The team explained it really well,” he said. “The important thing is to understand what was the issue there and they already modified things to the rear wing and we have good confidence that it won’t to happen again. So it’s a good thing that we have those issues in the beginning of the season.”

Pierre Gasly scored the team’s best result of the season last weekend, and Tsunoda admitted it was unfortunate to suffer a problem at a track where the team had a strong car.

“The race was a kind of really important race so I was kind of a bit compromised. But we understand well, so hopefully it doesn’t happen again. We understand also that issue happened already kind of in the first half of the race, quite early stages, so that affects slightly also our performance.

Gasly suspects team were worried about his wing

Gasly thinks his team warned him not to put up too much of a fight against Lewis Hamilton because they didn’t want him using his DRS and risking the same problem his team mate suffered.

He race engineer Pierre Hamelin told him late in the race not to fight too hard against Hamilton when the Mercedes driver caught him.

“Apparently I was quite quiet the whole race so he wanted to speak to me and he was quite stressed,” said Gasly in response to a question from RaceFans. “More stressed than I was because I had quite a lonely race until Lewis started to grow quite quickly in my mirrors.

“I knew the situation. To me, it doesn’t change, I tried to defend my position as hard as I can within the limits of the of the track. Obviously there you don’t want to do a mistake and end up in the wall. But then whether it’s a wall or gravel is the same thing, same game.

“I got the message, I think they were a bit worried maybe with the rear wing. I fought but honestly the…