Scuderia AlphaTauri were unable to convert their fruitful qualifying results to points at the Miami Grand Prix, as Yuki Tsunoda finished twelfth and an incident with Lando Norris resulted in Pierre Gasly’s retirement from the race.
AlphaTauri Technical Director Jody Egginton said that the result was particularly “disappointing” considering their Saturday performance. He praised Gasly’s efforts in the midfield battles, and said that the two consecutive incidents with Fernando Alonso and Norris accumulated into his retirement.
“Today’s race result is disappointing after such a strong Qualifying. Pierre battled strongly in the midfield against the Alpines, but unfortunately was hit by Alonso during a passing manoeuvre, costing him to lose places to both the Alpine and Stroll. Soon after, he had contact with Norris which caused more damage to his car, meaning we had no choice but to retire him from the race.”
Egginton said that the team “gambled” when it came to Tsunoda’s strategy, as the Japanese driver was having difficulty in the beginning of the race. Ultimately, the early stop he took did not help matters, and the car’s performance remained less than ideal. A second stop onto soft tyres saw some improvement, however, it was too late in the Grand Prix for Tsunoda to recover points.
“Yuki struggled in the first stint, so we gambled on an early stop but the pace and car balance in his second stint was also inconsistent, meaning it was difficult to make sufficient progress. We need to go through all the data to understand the reasons behind these issues. Yuki managed to show some better pace in his final stint on the soft tyre, but by this point we were running out of laps to move forward further, and he finished out of the points.”
Egginton is aware that there is much to be learned from their performance in Miami, he hopes to continue to improve their package and fight for more points as the season continues with the Spanish Grand Prix.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us before we arrive in Barcelona. We need to understand the various factors behind today’s performance, so we can move forward with our package and get back to scoring points.”
