by VALERIO BARRETTA
Alpine, double placement in Q3
Surprisingly, Alpine was among the biggest protagonists of the day at Montmeló. The French “show” began this morning, with the entry into the paddock of executive consultant Flavio Briatore (made official yesterday) and the first official declarations with this role, then on the track: the A524 defended itself very well on a complete circuit, going into Q3 for the first time in the season with both cars.
Pierre Gasley, even took away the satisfaction of beating Sergio Perez’s Red Bull: the Mexican, slipping to 11th place due to the penalty in Canada, will also give his position to Esteban Ocon, and Alpine can thus “block” an unexpected fourth row. The objectives now are three: not to repeat the contact in Monte-Carlo, bring home both cars in the points and understand why the car has grown so much. According to the pilots, they don’t know either.
Gasly’s words
“It’s a positive team result today, with both cars in Q3 for the first time this season“, commented Gasly. “Yesterday, during rehearsals, we knew there were some good signs, but we were a little cautious because we didn’t know the performance of the others well. Now, with seventh place, we confirmed that we are competitive and we finished a tenth and a half behind the top three. This year we have had difficult moments, from which we have and will continue to learn, ed it is equally important for us to understand why we had an increase in performance level like today. The car was good, I felt like we had optimized everything and there are always things we can improve. Tomorrow will be a challenging race and the conditions could be different again. We put ourselves in a great position to get another good team result“.
Ocon’s words
This is Ocon’s comment instead: “It’s a good result, that we didn’t expect to get it over the weekend since we didn’t make any updates to the car. The car was competitive and performed well straight away on Friday, and this was also true today. FP3 was challenging due to the heat, but I think the cloudy skies helped during qualifying. We need to analyze and understand why we are fast here, in these conditions and on this particular track. We hope to be able to at least maintain the position tomorrow and keep the other cars behind us to fight for points. It will be a long race and this track is particularly hard on the tyres, so there will also be some degradation to deal with in the race“.
#Spain #Alpine #Gasly #understand
