Scuderia AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly just missed a points-scoring finish after driving a strong race around the Circuit de Monaco to pass his way up from 17th on the grid to 11th at the finish after adopting an aggressive tyre strategy, while team-mate Yuki Tsunoda finished in 17th place.
Pierre Gasly
We started 17th and finished 11th, so considering Monaco and the track layout, I think we can be happy with this today. When I saw the rain on the grid I had a massive smile on my face, as I knew it was our opportunity to try something different and to hopefully move forward. We took some risks today, I called for Inters on lap one as we had nothing to lose. We managed to pass some cars, as the pace was there, and I must say from inside the cockpit this was really exciting. It was obviously tricky, sliding all over the place, but it was really fun, you were driving on the limit and that’s what Formula One is all about! We were fast in all the practice sessions, and even in the race today, so it’s a shame to be finishing just outside the points, as I think we deserved to be up there this weekend.
Yuki Tsunoda
It’s been a frustrating day, I didn’t have a good start and was P16 before the red flag, I need to go away and look at what happened there. The pace of the car was ok in the race, we gambled a bit on the Medium tyre for the restart and unfortunately, that strategy didn’t pay off today.
Jody Egginton (Technical Director)
It was an eventful race today. 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 the 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.
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