Scuderia AlphaTauri drivers Daniil Kvyat and Pierre Gasly made pretty uneventful debuts at Intercity Istanbul Park, with both struggling to make points finishes at the Turkish Grand Prix.
The last time the team raced here was in 2011 when they raced under the Scuderia Toro Rosso marque where they also finished out of the points.
Kvyat started the race seventeenth on the grid and by the chequered flag, the Russian had made up five places to cross the line in twelfth. He described race day as “uneventful” and left the weekend “frustrated”, adding: “It wasn’t a very eventful day. I just drove my race and finished P12, there wasn’t much that we could have done better. I’m a bit frustrated because there are no points for us today, it’s not pleasant to fight the car all race and finish with no reward.”
The conditions were treacherous with the only respite in the weather coming on Sunday during the race as the rain eased and the drivers navigated the slippery surface.
“It was a very tricky race, luckily I made very little mistakes today aside from one spin, so it felt good as a driver to bring the car home in these conditions, it’s good training for my concentration!” Said Kvyat, “generally speaking, our pace in the wet this weekend wasn’t good, and we struggled to get the car in the right window. We just need to understand what we did wrong this weekend and learn from it.”
Team-mate Gasly mirrored the sentiments, having struggled with performance on the wet tyres in qualifying and then the race. Having had his power unit changed overnight by the team, it led to penalties which meant he started Sunday’s race from the back of the grid. Gasly made up position to cross the line just behind his team-mate, in thirteenth place, shy of a points finish.
He said: ”The whole weekend was really bad for us. We had very poor performance on the wet tyres yesterday, and with today being wet again, we knew we were going to struggle massively. It’s a bit embarrassing because if it was all fine in the dry during practice on Friday, it means we were just too slow with the wets and intermediate tyres, we just couldn’t switch them on and struggled in FP3 and Quali.
“In addition, we took a penalty today. We need to understand what went wrong and what didn’t work in order to do better, in case we find ourselves in the same conditions. We already have some answers but still, we should have done a better job and I’m disappointed. Now it’s done and we should look at the next few races.”
