Pierre Gasly said his AlphaTauri car was just “way too slow” after a disappointing showing in Canada.
The Frenchman has been enduring a disappointing season and with it seeming like his fortunes may have changed with a P5 in Baku, he went right back to step one with a P14 finish in Canada.
Gasly ended ninth in the Drivers’ Championship last season but so far in 2022 has finished within the points just three times, only one more time than his number of retirements.
In Canada, his car just did not have the pace all weekend and he was only able to convert his P15 in qualifying to a 14th-place finish.
Gasly pitted on lap 5 in an attempt to get him into clean air with fresher tyres but it backfired when just two laps later, the Virtual Safety Car was deployed. After the race, the 26-year-old said they “just lacked pace.”
“We’re just way too slow,” he told F1.com. “So not a not a very entertaining day.
“We were struggling a lot like just front rear and no grip, brakes, traction. There wasn’t much we could do and we tried different strategies than others, didn’t get so lucky with the Virtual Safety Car, but at the end of the day, we just lacked pace.”
not the result we wanted today after showing a lot of promise pic.twitter.com/QzypDR25BC
— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) June 19, 2022
Worryingly for him and the team, they have yet to work out the main cause of why they struggle on certain tracks but Gasly said at the moment it was clear they “were just not competitive.”
“I don’t know if it’s track-specific or whether it’s a certain set-up direction on some tracks that we need to have people look into,” he said, as reported by GP Fans.
“But clearly, at the moment, I don’t know why, but in Canada, we were just not competitive.”
It was a disappointing day all round for AlphaTauri with Yuki Tsunoda causing a Safety Car after he crashed into the wall when leaving the pit lane. The Japanese driver said he went and apologised to the whole team for his mistake.
He said: “I’ve already been to the garage to the apologise to all the team, I just pushed too much on pit exit and unfortunately I went into the wall.
“The pace was good today, and we’d made a strong recovery up until that point, even if it was hard to overtake, so I’m disappointed with that ending.”
AlphaTauri are seventh in the Constructors’ Championship while Gasly is 11th and Tsunoda 15th.
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