Pierre Gasly equalled his best grid position this year as he qualified in sixth place for the 2019 Spanish Grand Prix, showing promise ahead of the race.
The Red Bull Racing driver was happy with his third row qualifying result which will see him line up alongside Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc as teammate Max Verstappen starts from fourth place.
Recording a lap time of 1:16.708, the Frenchman said, “Today was pretty positive, and it was a decent qualifying with sixth. We knew after Free Practice 3 it would be tough and we thought Ferrari would make a bigger step in qualifying, but Max was just a tenth behind Vettel and I was around a tenth behind Charles, so we’re a bit closer than we thought.
While Gasly knows that it will be hard to match the pace of the Mercedes AMG F1 Team cars of Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton, he is hoping for a good fight with the Ferrari’s
“For sure Mercedes are extremely quick but I think we have a decent car and hopefully we can take the fight to Ferrari tomorrow.
“It could be an interesting race with the option for a one-stop or two-stop, and anything can happen at this track where we know the start is really important, so we’ll try to maximise that for tomorrow.
“There’s still a lot of work to do, but overall things are getting better and I think the work we’ve been doing since the beginning of the year is starting to come together and pay off. Hopefully, tomorrow we can get some good points.”