Friday practice in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which is Formula 1’s fastest street circuit, was a productive day for Scuderia AlphaTauri. The Italian team had a “busy but successful” free practice, although they did saw some areas with the opportunity to improve.

Pierre Gasly was on excellent form once again as he finished inside the top 6 in both sessions, with rookie teammate Yuki Tsunoda ending up P10, 0.6s adrift of his French teammate.

“It’s been a very good Friday for us, a really positive P6 this morning and P5 this afternoon, at the moment I’m feeling very good in the car. I’m able to be quite aggressive and push the limits, I went over too far once or twice but that’s how we find the line and extract the maximum from the car.

I’m pretty pleased so far, especially because we did the lap without any slipstreams so potentially there’s more pace available to us tomorrow,” declares Pierre Gasly after both sessions.

While Tsunoda took this as a learning opportunity, being this his first time in this circuit, the team declared that he did exactly what was asked from him.

“It’s fairly similar to Monaco here, you have to build up the pace and also confidence in the braking zones, as most of the corners need strong braking. I went into the run-off areas a few times but it was good practice for me to find the limit and luckily I didn’t go into the wall! I think the progress from FP1 to FP2 was good, I struggled a bit in the morning, so it was a good step up in FP2.

''There are a few areas I still need to work on, but the pace is definitely there this weekend, we just need to put it altogether tomorrow.”