Tag Archives: motorsport

Pierre Gasly says that securing third place on the grid for the Las Vegas GP is “absolutely incredible” for his Alpine Formula 1 team.

The result came just a few weeks after Gasly joined team mate Esteban Ocon on the podium at Interlagos.

Gasly showed good speed in Las Vegas last year when he qualified fifth, only to fall away in the race with tyre graining.

Having been quick in practice he was eighth in Q1 and fifth in Q2 before securing third in the final session.

“It’s absolutely incredible, as a team,” said the Frenchman. “We started Bahrain on the last row with both cars, and all of a sudden, the last few weeks have been quite a change.

“I’m really happy and pleased with the work the team has been doing in a season where everything looked impossible, just to still stick together and put some more performance in that car.

“Going into qualifying today, I must admit we never thought we’ll be in a position to actually get in that top three, but I managed to have a very special lap at the right time on that last set in Q3, and it’s a very nice surprise.”

The team’s choice of a very low downforce setup appeared to pay off over the whole lap.

“We went with a pretty aggressive package in terms of downforce, so we are running very little downforce around this track,” said Gasly.

“We try to maximise the straight lines, we obviously make our lives slightly harder in the corners. But yeah, I think it’s a challenging track. It’s very cold conditions. It’s quite an outlier in the season. But I had a nice feeling in the car since P1. P2 went well. P3 went well.

“And then in that Q3, we managed to make it work with only one set of new tyres as well. So there was definitely some good pace. And yeah, for now, I’m very pleased.

“Obviously, it’s only qualifying, but I think it’s probably the first time I qualify in the top three. And it feels like it was a special one.”

Gasly said he wasn’t too concerned about having outqualified the top four drivers in the World Championship in Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri.

“At the minute, that’s not really what I’m thinking about,” he said. “I think we know where the target is for us. We’re fighting Haas and AlphaTauri [RB] in the constructors’.

“Obviously, whatever happened in that quali is amazing. It feels good to be in front of Max and McLaren and these guys.

“But at the end of the day, it’s not our fight. So we’ll give our best shot tomorrow. It’s a challenging one around here with the graining.

“So we’ll make sure we do our homework tonight to maximize the chances tomorrow. But for sure, from P3, we increase our chances to get some good points.”

Fernando Alonso believes that low track temperatures at the Formula 1 Las Vegas GP should give his Aston Martin team a boost over the course of the weekend.

The AMR24 has been very good at getting temperature into its tyres, which helps to explains why Alonso has often performed better over one lap in qualifying than in races.

That characteristic could prove useful for the team relative to its midfield rivals given the low temperatures associated with the night race.

“I’m optimistic,” said Alonso. “It’s a different track. Tyre temperature is an issue, because it’s very, very cold, long straights, and maybe this year’s car is one of the strengths that we have, we heat the tyres quite quickly, and we are okay in qualifying, where the tyres need to be in temperature very, very fast.

“I hope we can go back to our top of the midfield position, not the top four teams, but if we can be fifth or sixth team here, I think points are available on the race, and that will be the target.”

Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough agreed that good tyre warm-up could help the team this weekend.

“I think that has been a strength of our car this year,” he said. “We’ve often been able to get the tyres working well in qualifying. Obviously you want to look after the tyres in the race as well, so that those two are normally pretty well linked.

“We did a lot of learning last year. It was obviously very, very low grip last year, a huge track evolution, but still low grip offline all the way through the weekend. There’s a lot of similarities, obviously, to tracks like Baku, as far as circuit efficiency, running low rear wing levels, lots of low speed corners.

“We had a lot of graining with the tyres last year. Obviously, the tarmac should has aged, it should be better. We’ll do a lot of learning this year again. But I thought it was a real technical challenge last year, a good fun track – something a bit different.”

Meanwhile Alonso stressed that the team needs to gain some momentum as it heads into 2025.

“We are all trying to understand the problems of the car and the performance that we need to find,” said the Spaniard.

“And we seem to lost some of the performance that we had at the beginning of the year. And yeah, try to get better in the next few weekends, and especially into next year. A lot of changes in the team, the technical side as well.

“And we need to accommodate, and we need to shortcut all the all the time that is needed, because F1 is racing every two weeks, and we don’t have time to really think too much.

“But yeah, it’s good that the season is also finishing, and we have a little bit of a break to regroup, to reset a little bit, and hopefully next year, learn all the possible things that went wrong this year, and get better for 2025.”

Oliver Bearman says he learned useful lessons from an “impressively strange” Formula 1 Sao Paulo GP weekend at Interlagos – and has no regrets about losing his Formula 1 rookie status.

The future Haas race driver was called in at the last minute when Kevin Magnussen was taken ill, having already contested the Azerbaijan for the team when the Dane was on a ban.

He not only had to go straight into a sprint but also then had the experience of Sunday wet qualifying followed by a wet race.

The VF-24 proved tricky to drive in the race, and after picking up a 10-second penalty for contact with Franco Colapinto he had a spin and a touch with the barrier. Despite that he still managed to finish in 12^th place.

“It’s been a crazy weekend, that’s for sure,” he said. “Especially with the weather, with a different format, it’s been impressively strange.

“But that’s good for me to learn new things. And doing a race in the wet is very rare in F1, so I need to kind of make the most of all of them, and take all of the lapses as great experience.”

Having done three races Bearman can no longer be the rookie driver for Haas for a full day at the Abu Dhabi post-season test, although he can still share the Pirelli test car duties with Esteban Ocon.

However he admitted that a race weekend was actually more useful.

“Exactly,” he said when asked about the subject by this writer. “Racing in a race with other cars is much more useful than a test.

“And I got to learn the track, which I wasn’t going to be able to do without this race. And racing under these conditions is always tough. And I definitely learned a lot.”

On the in-lap at Interlagos Bearman apologised to the team for the mistakes he made, although he was reminded that it was probably the most difficult event he’s ever had do to.

“It’s tough because I didn’t deliver a very good race, and made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “But if you look at the grid and the amount of people that actually finished the race first of all, the amount of people that did mistakes was very low.

“So of course, to be the best and to score points today, I needed to stay on track the whole time. And unfortunately, I didn’t do that. I made too many mistakes. It’s definitely tough conditions, but I still wasn’t good enough today.”

He acknowledged that the Haas wasn’t easy to drive in the wet.

“I feel a bit less confident in the car on the inters,” he said. “Especially at high-speed, the car is a bit less predictable, which is never a nice feeling in these slippery conditions.

“But I think everyone has similar issues, and it’s tough to really say where we stand on wets, because it’s sometimes a bit less about the car, and a bit more about the whole package.

“Front-locking was an issue all of the day, even in qualifying, it was quite a limitation. And it’s really tough to get confidence in the car when the front tyres seem to lock at a tiny bit more brake pressure.

“So this is really difficult to manage, and difficult to get confidence in the car. And a lot of my mistakes today came from front locking, and once you lock the tyre, it’s really game over. You’re out of the track.”

Regarding the Colapinto penalty he said: “I thought that was a bit harsh. I hit him, he didn’t even feel me, like I hardly touched him, nothing happened to him.

“I lost 10 seconds, and then I got a 10-second penalty for losing 10 seconds. So it was really harsh, in my opinion.”

Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur agreed that Interlagos provided a good education for Bearman.

“For sure for a rookie this kind of weekend, it’s more than difficult,” he said when asked for his views by this writer. 

“You have no preparation, you jump into the car on Friday morning. But he did a very good job in FP1, SQ1, SQ2, I think SQ3 he had an issue.

“He did very well. And then [in the race] it was so chaotic for everybody. It’s not just about Ollie. But I think as you said, it’s a good lesson, a good experience, and this one is important to take.”