‘We were flying’ – Gasly says AlphaTauri were forced to slow him down en route to ‘amazing’ P4

While the home fans may have been cheering for the victory of Max Verstappen in the Dutch Grand Prix, AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly also drove a fine race at Zandvoort, claiming P4 – and having been so fast at times that his team were forced to try and slow him down…

Gasly had already been impressive on Saturday at Zandvoort, claiming a season best-equalling fourth on the grid, ahead of both Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.

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But the Frenchman maintained that performance throughout the race, too, holding Leclerc at bay throughout the 72-lap encounter around the demanding 2.6-mile Zandvoort circuit – as well as pulling off a beautiful pass on Fernando Alonso, as seen in the video above – to finish behind only Verstappen and the two Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.

“Amazing!” said Gasly after the race. “P4 behind the two Mercedes and Max, I mean we could not really hope for better. Twelve important points for us and a very good race, I must say. I really enjoyed it – 72 laps on this racetrack, a nice sort of battle with Charles, trying to manage him behind. I really enjoyed it. It’s a nice P4.”

Those “12 important points” take Gasly’s season tally to 66 – the Frenchman now within nine points of matching his total points from 2020, which included victory at Monza, where Formula 1 heads next weekend for the Italian Grand Prix.

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And he praised the work his AlphaTauri team had done this weekend – while admitting that he’d perhaps been too fast at points during the Dutch Grand Prix.

“I’m really pleased,” he said. “The car is fast, I managed to set it [up] the way I want and the team did a really fantastic job all the way through the weekend. Today we were flying – they were asking all the time to slow down the pace for tyres and I just wanted to push more because we had more pace than that. So, very good management and an amazing race.

“I’m [now] obviously very excited to get back to Monza after last year and obviously the expectations are very high,” he added. “We’ve clearly maximised our package this weekend, so it’ll be interesting to see how it performs next weekend in Italy.”

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It wasn’t such a happy story on the other side of the AlphaTauri garage, meanwhile, with Yuki Tsunoda retired from P16 with a drivetrain issue on Lap 50 – with Tsunoda explaining to the media: “We saw an issue on the PU data and unfortunately had to retire the car. Up until that point the race was going quite well and the pace of the car was there, but it was hard to overtake.”