Jody Egginton says the biggest lesson Scuderia AlphaTauri can take away from the Monaco Grand Prix weekend was to have a ‘tidier’ Saturday after seeing Pierre Gasly’s obvious pace go to waste after the Frenchman was caught out in Qualifying.
Gasly missed out on setting a final lap time in Qualifying at the Circuit de Monaco after being caught out by people ahead backing up the pack, with the Frenchman mere metres away from starting his lap when the chequered flag fell. This meant he started down in seventeenth when he had shown top seven pace all through practice.
On race day, Gasly made the immediate decision to switch to the intermediate tyre despite many runners staying on the full wets, and it enabled him to make up a handful of places. He finished on the road in twelfth, having lost some time and ground to Sebastian Vettel during the pit stops, so when Esteban Ocon’s penalty for colliding with Lewis Hamilton was applied, he was only promoted to eleventh and not into the final points-paying position.
Yuki Tsunoda went the other way, starting eleventh and ending down in seventeenth, with the Japanese racer not being able to find the same kind of performance on the intermediate tyre that Gasly was able to achieve.
Egginton says the team needed a better Saturday if they were to have a chance of points in Monaco, and the pace that the recovering Gasly showed during the race despite the difficult conditions showed the Frenchman should have been a contender within the top ten on Sunday.
“It was an eventful race today,” said Egginton, the Technical Director at AlphaTauri. “The rain shower at the start of the race was obviously a big disturbance, but it was also a good opportunity for us with Pierre to get him moving forward.
“We had an aggressive strategy and got him onto the Inters early on, which worked quite well, whilst a lot of other runners stayed on the full wets and wanted to make that work until they could cross over to a dry compound.
“Looking at Pierre’s pace, we took a similar decision for Yuki and put him onto the Inters too, although he struggled slightly to make it work as well. We then moved both drivers onto the Hards, in theory this would’ve taken us to the end of the race, had there not been a red flag.
“Following that, we basically held position until the end of the race. After Ocon’s penalty we’ve come away just outside of the points, we lost some time to Vettel during the pit stop, so unfortunately that has cost us.
“We had a good recovery race today with Pierre but the main lesson for this weekend is that we need to have a tidier Saturday in order to make the most of the opportunities we have on Sunday.”
