Gasly is running more downforce than Ocon at Spa
Alpine Formula 1 drivers Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have gone in very different directions on downforce levels for the Belgian GP – and it didn’t work out as expected in Saturday’s wet qualifying.
As part of a general package of updates the Enstone team brought a new low drag wing to Spa.
It was tried for the first time in FP2, and while Ocon preferred to stick with it for qualifying and the race, Gasly went back to a high downforce version.
He should thus in theory have had the advantage in the wet qualifying session, and indeed he was an impressive second in Q1.
However he slipped back to 12th in Q2 while Ocon progressed to Q3 and earned what became ninth place on the grid after Max Verstappen’s penalty was applied.
“A good afternoon for us,” said Ocon when asked by this writer about his session. “I think we optimised well the car potential today. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any new sets for Q3, which hurt us a little bit.
“We decided to stick on a dry setup, to have little bit more straight-line performance. That’s why we were very quick in sector one. And we decided to split across cars, which is never an easy decision as well. But to me, it was quite important, the race aspect of things.
“And if it’s dry tomorrow, touching wood, we can hopefully look ahead and have some good opportunity, more than looking behind, looking to fall back, really.
“On the dry it was clear that it was the better option. Obviously, on the wet, it should be quicker, the higher downforce. But yeah, today we’ve maximised the potential we had. And even with the light car in sector two, we were quite strong in general.”
Ocon noted that as qualifying went on he was able to understand how best to make use of his low-drag configuration.
“Pierre in Q1 was a good, four or five tenths quicker,” he said. “I kind of thought that’s how we are going to qualify, basically, it was quite clear.
“But somehow after a couple of runs I managed to figure out where I could gain from that low downforce and use the potential of it. And it turned out to work alright in the end.”
He added: “I think we were on the max downforce in Budapest, and we killed the tyres. So we go the other way.”
Meanwhile Gasly remains hopeful that his wing choice will prove beneficial in Sunday’s race.
“On my car we decided to go with more downforce,” he said. “So a different approach between the two cars. We’ll see if it pays off tomorrow in the race. But we’re quite confident that it matched what we expect in terms of gains with this new package.
“We know it can be a long race here. It’s going to be hot tomorrow. It was between the one and two stop before, and we seemed quite good on the tyre. So we’ll have to see what we can do.
“But I think we’re going to be in the fight for P10, P9 with these guys ahead of us. So that’s where our race will be.”
Gasly admitted that things went wrong for him as qualifying progressed and he had issues with tyre temperatures.
“Q1 was really good,” he said. “The car felt great, and the track obviously dried up a bit. And I just think we got it wrong with our out-laps, going faster in the out-laps, and my tyres were cooked every time in my push laps.
“So just from a very strong balance and potential in Q1 the car just felt very different in Q2. I’m doing the same lap time when the track’s drier, and it’s just quite disappointing because there was obviously good potential. But that’s the difference between a Q3 and Q2.”
Adam Cooper F1 