Pierre Gasly spent most of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in a DRS train sandwiched between the Williams of Alex Albon and the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton. And the Frenchman, who finished the race in P12, was left annoyed after he “tried everything” to get into the points, but to no avail.
Gasly had a trying weekend at Imola in general, failing to get out of Q1 on Friday before contact with Zhou Guanyu in the Sprint left him in P17. But Gasly was at least at the centre of one of the highlights of the race as he managed to hold up the Mercedes of seven-time world champion Hamilton from Lap 18 until the end of the race.
Despite that, the AlphaTauri racer said the poor qualifying performance and DRS train in the race had all been “quite frustrating”.
“Yeah, it was pretty much the entire race with a pretty big Mercedes in my mirror and pretty big back of Alex’s car in front,” said Gasly. “And I tried everything but even with the DRS we were not able to catch that Williams so yeah, quite frustrating… but we know that when we start from the back, it’s always difficult.
“We’ve had really great performances in quali up until this weekend, where sadly we didn’t perform well, which meant we were on the back foot from Friday. We need to go away and work out how to get back to a stronger qualifying performance for the next race.”
