Tsunoda apologetic over pit lane crash in Montreal, as Gasly says AlphaTauri were 'too slow'

An apologetic Yuki Tsunoda admitted he’d pushed too hard on his exit from the pit lane at this weekend's Canadian Grand Prix, after the AlphaTauri racer crashed into the barrier at the pit exit as he attempted to re-join the race.

Tsunoda started the race in 20th after his AlphaTauri AT03 was fitted with a series of new power unit components. Tsunoda managed to make his way through the field and was at once stage sitting as high as 10th.

But on Lap 47, Tsunoda came into the pit lane for his second stop of the race, putting on another set of hard tyres. And as he made his way onto the track, the Japanese racer crashed into the barrier at the pit exit at Turn 2. And Tsunoda provided an explanation as to what happened.

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“I’ve already been to the garage to apologise to all the team,” said Tsunoda. “I just pushed too much on pit exit and unfortunately, I went into the wall. The pace was good today, and we’d made a strong recovery up until that point, even if it was hard to overtake, so I’m disappointed with that ending.”

Tsunoda was then asked if their were any positives he could take from his first race in Canada, to which he said: “The pace was good, I think, to come back from FP2 [where Tsunoda finished P17] when we didn’t have that much pace. We recovered from that.”

Pierre Gasly in the other AlphaTauri finished the race in 14th, and the French driver, who had come into the weekend harbouring hopes of finishing in the points – following a P5 finish a week ago in Baku – was downbeat by his car’s lack of performance, and believes they need to find a solution to their issues ahead of Silverstone.

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“We’re just way too slow so not a very entertaining day,” said Gasly. “Starting the race out of position, we thought we’d go for a different strategy, so we pitted a bit earlier, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. We were struggling a lot with grip, sliding around a lot in these conditions, and we just didn’t have the pace to fight in the top 10.

“We will have to analyse everything, but objectively we were just too slow in the race. Likewise, we didn’t get lucky with the Virtual Safety Car, but at the end of the day it wouldn’t have changed our end result that much. We need to use the gap now to work out what we could’ve done better, so we can arrive in Silverstone as best prepared as possible.”