Italian Grand Prix winner Pierre Gasly was eliminated in the first round of qualifying for this weekend’s race after running out of battery power before the finishing line.
Gasly was only able to record the 16th quickest time of the session, failing to progress by less than five hundredths of a second.“It was obviously a very, very disappointing qualifying for us after a great free practice,” said Gasly.
“Today we missed it by half a tenth. We lost over a tenth with the ERS deployment running out of charge way too early 300 metres before the line. We lost over a tenth to Daniil [Kvyat] there and it cost us Q2 and an opportunity to go further.”
Missing out by such a small margin is “a reality of where we are in this midfield”, said Gasly.
“Last weekend was exceptional and we know that this midfield is so tight if we make mistakes as we did today there is no room for errors.”
Gasly’s elimination followed a strong run in final practice, where he was fifth fastest. He suspects a set-up change since then also compromised his qualifying performance.
“We made a few changes after third practice that didn’t go in the right direction and we’re still analysing why we went slower than practice,” he explained in response to a question from RaceFans. “We lost grip and we can see it, so we’re still investigating.
“My lap was decent, honestly. There wasn’t any mistakes. Obviously you can lose a bit of time here and there but it was a pretty good lap. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just saying us as a team didn’t do the perfect job today.”
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Jere (@jerejj)
12th September 2020, 18:22
Fun fact: He used a French word starting with the letter P. One of the rare-ish occasions of drivers using a word or words from a language other than English on the team radio.
Fernando Alonso did some radio messages in Italian when he was at Ferrari,
Seb has cursed in both his native German (Brazil last season) and Finnish (Abu Dhabi last season),
Kimi has cursed in his native Finnish on two occasions (Canada 2017 and Russia 2018),
and most recently, Gasly in his native French, LOL.
Sridhar
13th September 2020, 5:30
He probably needs some of the energy drink from the sister teams.
On a serious note Gasly never seemed to make it count in quali yesterday .
By a combination of circumstances being in the right place at the right he managed to become a race winner.
That said he is yet to peak as a driver and needs to avoid letting the win get to his head.
That