Pierre Gasly missed pipping Kevin Magnussen to P7 on the grid in Mexico City by only 0.006s after his Alpine ran out of battery power just before the line.
The Frenchman thus had to settle for eighth place, having qualified seventh last weekend in Austin.
Two strong performances within seven days indicated that the team’s latest upgrade package introduced at the US GP has already paid off, and it was even sweeter given that Gasly was only 20th after struggling in the earlier FP3 session.
He admitted it was frustrating to be so close to repeating his Austin performance.
“Yeah, especially because we ran out of battery, l don’t know, 70 metres before the line,” he said when asked by this writer about the gap.
“So these six-thousandths, we clearly had them. But I’m looking more the bigger picture. This morning, we were P20, absolutely nowhere, struggling for grip, on the softs. The whole weekend’s been quite difficult, and I could not get the car where I wanted.
“Made a lot of changes before quali, and then it was just a completely different story. So straight away from Q1 I managed to put some strong laps, and then after that, just being able to repeat it.
“So definitely happy. Since we have the new parts in Austin, we were Q3 last week, we were able to do another Q3, so definitely on the right path.”
Gasly admitted that he wasn’t optimistic after being at the bottom of the times in FP3.
“Honestly this morning, I just could not believe it,” he said. “Just everything felt wrong. And going into quali, the confidence was extremely low that we will get out of Q1.
“The car was just more together. Going over these kerbs, I didn’t manage to get it right once during the whole weekend, throughout the whole free practices.
“We managed to find a bit of consistency in quali, and managed to find some good time there. In the high-speed section, you need to really have a good car balance to really be at the limit there. And that’s what we managed to find.”
Gasly confirmed that the upgrades are working well, although it’s not easy to find the sweet spot.
“Since last week we clearly seem to have the best performance we’ve had all year,” he said. “The window is quite small though, we’ve seen in practice, it was difficult. It’s still important to get it right, but there is definitely some potential.
“Excluding the top four, we were the best of the midfield in Austin, and again today, without that battery, we’re again P7. So definitely some positives.”
Gasly confirmed that the team still needs to do a decent race with the upgraded parts.
“We’ve still got to confirm our performance in the race,” he said. “ Austin was not a good race for us. I think we understood what went wrong.
“We got the learning from it, and that’s why, for tomorrow, I’m a bit more hopeful, but still, I think for all of us, it’s important we show some good race pace tomorrow.”
Meanwhile having been encouraged by the upgrade package on Friday Gasly’s team mate had a difficult Q1 session, and could not better 19th.
“We did minor setup changes,” he said. “But unfortunately, something didn’t quite work for us, because we were clearly very slow, a lot of understeer in the car. It was very difficult.
“It was a frustrating session, and we need to be on top of that. We are very different across cars this weekend, and we need to understand went wrong, and what we could have done better.”
Adam Cooper F1 