Photo credit: BWT Alpine F1 Team
Pierre Gasly has had a solid start to the season at Alpine, bagging points in both of the races so far, including a recovery from P20 to P9 in Bahrain.
Speaking at the press conference on Friday, ahead of the Australian GP, team principal Otmar Szafnauer confirmed that Pierre has been working on settling in.
“Yeah, he’s new and it takes time. He’s enjoying the team, he likes his engineering team and the mechanics and we like him.”
“He’s fast but it will take time at the margin to eke every little bit out of the car and he’s still getting comfortable with us.”
Szafnauer added that Gasly feels he has more to give, and that it’s only a matter of time before he starts reaching his full potential.
“I talked to him after the last race and he said, ‘look, give me a couple more races and there’s a couple of tenths in me.’”
Asked where this performance gain was going to come from, Szafnauer explained: “I think it’s just a better understanding of driver and engineering team to set the car up like he likes it.”
Alpine is ahead of their 2022 rival McLaren, but has been leapfrogged by the much-improved Aston Martin, leaving them in something of a no man’s land in relation to the top four teams.
Szafnauer has reiterated that the goal is closing the gap to their competitors, and said he believes it will be possible for Alpine to take on Mercedes as the season progresses and the upgrades start coming in.
“We think we can fight with them. Yeah, we too have a decent-size upgrade coming for Baku and then a little bit more only a week later in Miami, so we continue to push the upgrades out.”
