Gasly ‘frustrated’ to finish outside the points at Imola after mammoth 45-lap defence against Hamilton

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.

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“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.”

Gasly did, however, find some positives for the team and carries hope that AlphaTauri can unleash the pace in Miami that they were only able to briefly show at Imola.

“Yeah, for sure [hope things will be better in Miami],” said Gasly. “I mean, every time we were alone on track, we were competitive, but I think we were only two laps alone between yesterday and today. The traffic, we know in this track, it’s extremely hard to overtake and today we paid the price.”

AlphaTauri Team Principal Franz Tost admitted that Gasly “struggled” over the weekend but believes the upgrades that his team brought to their home race worked as planned.

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“Pierre… struggled a little bit this weekend and, in the race, he was unable to pass the cars ahead of him, to finish the race in 12th,” admitted Tost. “We now have to analyse everything and find out what we can do to improve our performance for Miami.

“I think the new upgrades we introduced here this weekend worked well, and we now need to fine-tune the car to have both drivers steadily in the points.”

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