The new season hasn’t kicked off in the best way for AlphaTauri, as the team has been experiencing quite a few issues with both their AT03s.

An engine problem prevented Yuki Tsunoda from setting a time in yesterday’s Qualifying, while Pierre Gasly was forced to an early retirement in Bahrain last weekend, after his PU caught on fire.

Another Power Unit related issue cut the French driver’s FP3 run short on Saturday morning, after 11 laps that put him in P7 for the session.

Things looked no better at the start of the afternoon’s Qualifying, as the floor of Gasly’s car suffered some damage. Nonetheless, he managed to advance to Q3 and his Alpha will be starting from P9 on the grid.

“I’m really happy to make it through to Q3 again today. It wasn’t that easy, as we suffered some damage to the floor during Q1, we managed to tape this during the session and get through to the top 10, but we’ll need to go away to analyse the data and see how much this impacted our performance,” he explained after Quali.

“It was a really tight Quali today, with only a few tenths separating P5-P10, so I’m pleased with where we are.”

Tight indeed, as only 0.071s are separating his - 1:29.254s - ninth place from Valtteri Bottas’ P8 - 1:29.183s – and 0.186s are between his car from Esteban Ocon’s Alpine up in fifth position.

a good night out for @PierreGASLY! 👊 making it into Q3 once again 👏 @yukitsunoda07 didn't have any luck and wasn't able to set a time due to a cooling system issue pic.twitter.com/X4R2Mi5mRc

— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) March 26, 2022

“We’ll fight for everything we can tomorrow but it’s going to be a long race and considering the tyre degradation we’ve already seen in the practice session I think there will be a lot of different strategies tomorrow; we’ll be working hard tonight to decide what will work best for us.”