Pierre Gasly tried to do his best in Melbourne

Esteban Ocon told Canal Plus that it was possible to score points, or at least to fight around the 10th place in Melbourne. His teammate Pierre Gasly does not entirely share the same assessment, although the lack of performance from Alpine is a fact.

A penalty without consequence

For the second time of the weekend, Pierre Gasly received a penalty for crossing the pit lane exit line. This 5-second penalty had no impact on his result: starting 17th on the grid, he finished 13th with a comfortable gap ahead of Bottas. However, making the same mistake twice could be detrimental if the car’s performance were to improve. The French driver takes responsibility for his error but remains somewhat puzzled about this pit lane exit line. He spoke about it on Canal Plus after the Grand Prix:

(I) I am going to have a conversation with them (the stewards), we talked about it during the drivers’ briefing. There were dashed lines there at the beginning, yesterday in free practice 1, where we could open (the trajectory). We discussed that the pit exit was really tight compared to the racing line, it was quite dangerous. As soon as I saw the dashed lines, I tried to open up a bit (the trajectory) thinking it was okay, but in the end, they added a yellow line on top. Visually, I thought I had done it right, but in the end, it was not the case. It’s my fault, for sure, it’s just that I want to talk to them about it because it was really not clear to me.

Nevertheless, this misunderstanding did not have any impact on the outcome: « It is anecdotal for our race, there is no point in focusing on it. »

Always confident in his team.

Unlike Esteban Ocon, he did not consider it possible to score points this weekend: “We need to improve. We are still far from the performance we need to score points. Besides, we know that the car has not changed. We will have new parts that will start to arrive (from Japan in two weeks). So I hope this will bring us closer to the cars ahead.”