Pierre Gasly may not have matched his strongest result of the year with a seventh-place finish at the São Paulo Grand Prix in Formula 1. However, the Alpine driver has no doubts that it was one of the best performances of the season so far.
Quoted on RacingNews365.com, the Frenchman expressed great satisfaction with the performance: ‘It was one of our best races of the year. I had two very, very strong starts, managed to overtake cars on both occasions, and in the second start, I was able to get close to [Carlos] Sainz’s gearbox. Throughout almost the entire race, I stayed with Sainz, the Aston Martins ahead, and also the Mercedes, and we managed to make the two-stop strategy work with good tire management. I overtook George [Russell] and Lewis [Hamilton] on track, and in the end, I was running within a tenth of Carlos’.
According to Gasly, this race performance required sacrificing more in qualifying in terms of car setup: ‘I am very happy because we had a lot of difficulties on the track since we arrived. We knew it was a compromise, we accepted it, and we missed out on Q3 by four tenths, and that’s what we saw in the data.’
