Alpine had a truly shocking weekend at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix as they had problem after problem. They never looked like scoring any points.
It all started in FP1 when Pierre Gasly’s car started smoking and caught fire. A problem caused by a hydraulic leak according to the team.
After his mechanics did an incredible job to get the car ready for qualifying later that day for Sunday’s race, the Frenchman crashed at turn 3 in Q1.
Sprint day was hardly any better, he finished P13 in the race on Saturday.
Sunday’s main event saw the 2020 Italian GP winner cross the line in P14. He pitted twice and overtook Bottas and Sargeant, but finished 7.5s away from Yuki Tsunoda in P10.
Gasly gave a very honest assessment of a tough weekend post-race.
“I think as a team, it’s difficult to have a worse weekend than we had. It’s important to quickly move on,”
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong pretty much for us. We clearly underperformed, so we’ve got to look at it objectively and honestly.
“We’ve showed much better performance in Melbourne and in the first two weekends, and this weekend we were nowhere near that.
“We’ll have to analyse and especially make sure that this never happens again this season, because we can’t afford it for the championship.”
Gasly had no issue with his team bringing a number of updates to Baku. Analysis as to why they underperformed will take place and they can look forward to another chance in Miami this weekend.
“You’ve got to put the parts on as soon as you get them,” said Gasly. “It made it tricky with only four laps in FP1 and no time to really analyse the car and basically go into parc fermé with the setup that we had without really testing.
“It was the same challenge for everyone and I just feel like we just massively underperformed. We’ll work, we’ll analyse. I know we have more performance.
“I’m just looking forward to go to Miami on a more classic track.”
On the floor, Gasly has some thoughts on why it didn’t quite go to plan in Azerbaijan.
Alpine took Esteban Ocon’s out of parc fermé to make changes to his car. He started from the pit lane for both races and fared no better than his teammate.
“I got my ideas why it didn’t work, but unfortunately you can’t really change the car.
“Esteban tried different stuff on his side, starting from the pit lane. But, yes, we’ll analyse everything and come back in Miami.”
Overall it was a dreadful event for the Enstone-based team. Gasly conceded he’s never had a weekend like it before in regards to issues in every single session throughout the event.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had that. That’s why I think we just got to clearly move on,” stated Gasly.
“It’s been difficult for Esteban, it’s been difficult for me, it’s been difficult for the team. I think no one really enjoyed that.
“There are things that we can fix all together and, yes, we’ve just got to stick together as a team and move forward.”
Photo credit: BWT Alpine F1 Team
