Gasly solved mystery handling problem by using Ocon’s settings · RaceFans

Pierre Gasly cured a mystery handling problem on his car by switching to his team mate’s settings earlier in the year.

The Alpine driver said his A524 has handled better since he began using the same differential map settings as Esteban Ocon at the sixth round of the championship.

“There’s definitely been a step,” Gasly told media including RaceFans in Miami. “We realised that at the start of the year, until Miami, we found out that there was a couple of things which weren’t right on my differential, and used the other side’s map and then the car felt a lot more together.

“This played quite a big part in terms of consistency on the following races in having, not the ideal balance, but having a lot more consistency from the car.”

Gasly said the team hadn’t been able to understand some of the problems he reported with his car earlier in the year.

“There were a couple of things that didn’t really make sense with the car balance I was getting,” he said. “So just asked to try the other side’s map and then we straight away found more performance.

“It’s one of these things where it was sort of like a coding problem, which unfortunately couldn’t be spotted. It was more like a software type of issue. Bus cost us sort of performance early on and now we’ve found a lot more consistency and at least we’re aligned on both sides here.”

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However Gasly admitted the team have more to do for him to be completely happy with his car’s balance. “At the minute, what we’re missing is the balance is not ideal everywhere,” he said. “On some tracks, like Barcelona, I was reasonably happy.

“We’re just lacking load in the high-speed which triggers a bit too much sliding and then obviously in the race, overheating the tyres and you pay the price on traction. The stability is not ideal, but it’s fine, it’s just the understeer in some places, which we’re trying to cure and then our traction is not ideal.

“When you put it that way, it’s not great, but obviously they are looking at fine details. What I like is we’ve got very clear ideas of what we’re missing. We have also good ideas on how to fix them.

“So I don’t think we’ll see everything this season, but we’ll see some evolution this season. And I’m quite confident that also for next year we’ve got a good plan and process to basically improve what we got.”