Gasly has been kicked out of Baku qualifying
Pierre Gasly has been disqualified from the results of Baku qualifying for a fuel flow infringement, and the Alpine driver will thus start Sunday’s race from the back of the grid.
The Frenchman did a great job to be fourth fastest in Q1, and he was then 13th in the second session.
However FIA technical boss Jo Bauer then determined that the car had “exceeded the instantaneous fuel mass flow” in Q2, an offence that led to an automatic exclusion from qualifying, although the team argued that far from boost performance the offence had the opposite effect.
The Enstone team tried a similar “no advantage” argument five years ago to the week at the 2019 Singapore GP when Daniel Ricciardo was deemed to have had an MGU-K power spike that led to his disqualification.
On this occasion the FIA noted: “The team representatives explained that they had an unexpected short duration technical fault that raised the fuel mass flow greater than expected in a transient fashion. The cause was agreed by the FIA technical staff.
“That the fuel mass flow was greater than the limit at that moment was not disputed by the competitor.
“The competitor demonstrated to the Stewards that the technical fault resulted in a slower lap time and that no performance advantage was obtained at that moment.
“Thus, they argue, this should be taken into mitigation. They also noted that the great rarity of breaches of this article demonstrates that this is not part of their strategy, and that the scale of the transient simply exceeded the margin they maintain to prevent a beach.”
Those who will now move up a place on the grid are Nico Hulkenberg, Lance Stroll, Daniel Ricciardo, Lando Norris, Valtteri Bottas, Esteban Ocon and Zhou Guanyu.
“I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome of today’s qualifying performance,” said Gasly. “It is obviously a pity that a minor fuel flow infringement means we are disqualified from the session.
“In any case, we expected to find it tough to reach Q2 as the car has been tricky all weekend, which has shown on the timesheets throughout practice. I was very pleased with my laps in qualifying and, even if the result doesn’t look spectacular, it was one of our most complete sessions of the season.
“The car has been sliding a lot, generally lacking rear grip, and we managed to improve that with some changes. We will have to stay calm in the race tomorrow and aim to be in the mix at the end. It’s usually a tough one here for racing and a lot can happen so we will give it our all from the back.”
Team boss Oliver Oakes said: “Today was initially looking like a more promising day after the difficulties we faced during practice on Friday, where we struggled. Despite a great effort from Pierre to progress to the second part of Qualifying, he was later disqualified for exceeding the fuel mass flow on his final run in Q2, which is disappointing given the speed he showed.”
Adam Cooper F1 