F1 | US GP | Pierre Gasly pleased with AlphaTauri's performance during qualifying wants to beat their Championship rivals
After a very tough built-up to qualifying, Pierre Gasly claims to be very happy with the team's improvements overnight and, despite knowing the track won't be the best of the year, aims at beating Alpine and gain precious points for the Constructors Championship
The weekend at the Circuit of the Americas hasn’t been easy for AlphaTauri. The team has been struggling to find their pace because the track is particularly tough on tyres, especially on the rears and that, combined with the hotter than usual temperatures, gave the tyres a very hard time.
that’s set up tomorrow quite nicely 👌 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/G3nrqDpkVJ
— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) October 23, 2021
“This track seems to be more difficult for us compared to McLaren and Ferrari,” said Pierre Gasly at the end of the Qualifying session.
“Today I clearly hadn’t the pace to fight with them but relative to the Alpines and Astons, we were able to outqualify them, so this is a good result”.
The Frenchman qualified ninth but he will start 8th on Sunday’s race, courtesy of Valtteri Bottas’ five-place grid penalty for exceeding his engine allocation.
“I think we can be pleased today, we’ve got the four top teams ahead of us, so we’re starting in a good position".
“Friday was slightly harder than we were expecting but we’ve made some good improvements for today,” Gasly explained.
“We started with a similar set up to what we normally use but it clearly didn’t work out yesterday with all the bumps, the high temperature and tyre degradation so we had to make a lot of changes to our car and some compromises to make the car work a bit better.
“Of course, we lost a bit of performance in some of the parts of the track. However, I’m still very happy with our performance today,” the French driver concluded during the post-race interview with MotorLat.
Gasly will start on Medium compounds on Sunday, which will probably give the team a strategic advantage in the second half of the race.
“It’s good that we managed to qualify with the Mediums, to give ourselves the best option tomorrow, but I think it’s going to be very tight here with the tyres, as this track is so tough on them.
“We’ve got lots of strategy choices available for us, so we’ll need to look at all the possibilities tonight and choose the best option for tomorrow,”
Then, he added:
