Gasly demands answers after ‘embarrassing’ AlphaTauri performance in Istanbul

Pierre Gasly’s Turkish Grand Prix was always going to be difficult after a penalty meant he started the race from the back of the gird. But even in spite of that, a disgruntled Gasly labelled AlphaTauri’s subsequent performance in Istanbul “embarrassing”, after both he and Daniil Kvyat came home a lap down and out of the points.

Gasly actually did brilliantly at the beginning of the race to counter his P19 starting position – earned after AlphaTauri were handed a grid penalty for disassembling, but then failing to change, Gasly’s power unit – jumping six places to 13th on the opening lap. From there, though, the Frenchman – who’d featured in the top seven across both of Friday’s dry practice sessions, only to qualify P15 in the wet – didn’t have the pace to challenge, as he came home 13th, one place behind Kvyat.

READ MORE: 5 winners and 5 losers from the Turkish Grand Prix

“The whole weekend was really bad,” said Gasly after the race. “We had a very poor performance in the wet, and honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing, because we’re just so slow with the wets, with the inters, we can’t switch them on.

“It was the same in quali. We took a penalty, so a lot of problems. We need to do better, because honestly, it was a poor performance from our side since yesterday morning. We’ll have to work for the next races.”

The result in Istanbul ended a 10-race streak of points finishes for AlphaTauri this season, and was all the more galling given that it came off the back of one of the team’s strongest performances of the year at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix – where Gasly qualified fourth, while Kvyat then finished in that position in the race.

And despite the uniquely slippery conditions the teams and drivers faced in Istanbul, Gasly believed that he and AlphaTauri should nonetheless have performed better across the weekend.

READ MORE: Monza winner Gasly keen to take on more responsibility at AlphaTauri as he eyes ‘even better’ 2021

“It was obviously very unique conditions that I don’t expect we’re going to face [again],” said Gasly. “But just for all of us, I think we need to understand what went wrong and what didn’t work. We already have some answers from yesterday, but we could not make the changes for today. But still, we should have anticipated all these things and I think we could have done a better job. But now it’s done and we need to look at the next three races.”

Meanwhile, with Ferrari taking a 27-point haul from Turkey – their biggest score of the season – the sixth-placed Scuderia pulled significantly clear of AlphaTauri in the constructors’, with the difference in points between the two Italian teams growing from 14 to 41 after the Turkish Grand Prix.