It was a very mixed French Grand Prix for the Scuderia AlphaTauri Honda team, with Pierre Gasly finishing seventh at his home race adding more points to the team’s tally, unlike Yuki Tsunoda who finished thirteenth.
Gasly had a very strong home race, the Frenchman did excellent early on to be right in the mix with both the McLaren F1 Team and the Scuderia Ferrari. Gasly did unfortunately lose two places during his pit-stop, one to each team. The Frenchman recovered well though to finish behind both McLaren’s but ahead of the Ferrari’s, resulting in a seventh place finish.
Tsunoda had a difficult race, after crashing in qualifying the rookie had to start from the pit-lane. Tsunoda recovered some ground very quickly though making up three places on the opening lap. His progress was halted however after getting stuck behind both Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN cars. The team tried to undercut both however it did mean that come the end of the race, Tsunoda’s tyres were finished. All in all a thirteenth place finish isn’t the end of the world for the youngster.
AlphaTauri Head of Vehicle Performance Guillaume Dezoteux thinks Gasly did a fantastic job, and that lots needs to be learned and analysed to support Tsunoda.
“It’s been a successful but difficult race today. We managed to bring home a seventh place with Pierre, which is a nice reward for the weekend. After the morning rain, the track had a big reset and the tyres grained quite badly, not only on our cars but on most of the field. In the race, we had to do a lot of tyre management to stay on the one stop strategy and Pierre did a fantastic job at attacking and defending throughout.
“With regards to Yuki, it was obviously quite complicated starting from the pitlane, but he showed a good pace on the opening laps. However, after the stop, in free air, he couldn’t make as much ground as we would have hoped. We will analyse everything and see what the key learnings are for him going forward.
“Today we increased our gap to Aston Martin by 3 points, which is really positive. The fight in the midfield is very tight but we are up for the challenge and our competitors can count on us to make their lives difficult until the final race in Abu Dhabi.”
