Pierre Gasly believes Toro Rosso has the potential to lead the midfield contingent at Formula 1’s Japanese Grand Prix, which takes place on home turf for power unit partner Honda.
Toro Rosso secured its best combined qualifying result of the season as Brendon Hartley took sixth, with Gasly seventh, profiting from an updated engine package.
The duo will start behind Haas opponent Romain Grosjean, with only the Mercedes drivers, Max Verstappen and Kimi Raikkonen further up the grid.
“I think the best thing to do would be to overtake Romain straight away and then after stay there,” he said.
“So I think that will be the target and then after that of course we know we don’t race with Ferrari or Red Bull, it’s like a different series.
“But it’s difficult to overtake on this track and the best opportunity you have most of the time is the start so we need to focus on this
“Suzuka is a big event for Honda, you can see so many fans and Japanese people, they want to show what they can do and clearly we did it [in qualifying].
“We did only half the job so we shouldn’t be too excited before we know the proper result on Sunday but for sure such a performance on this track is special.
“For the team I think it’s unbelievable, the best qualifying of the season for Toro Rosso and Honda and to do it in Suzuka.”
Gasly added that the full introduction of Honda’s Spec 3 engine has proved beneficial, but was hesitant to be overconfident on account of its uncertain performance in race trim.
“Clearly we have more performance,” he said.
“If I have to give a number I don’t know exactly it’s not like we had another engine and we could compare, but clearly to be in that situation with both cars in Q3… OK it was a bit of a strange qualifying, we had to go out at the right time and everything.
“Everything went the way we wanted and we were pretty fortunate with the timing, but still I think we are clearly much more competitive than we have been in the last few events.
“So overall I would say it’s a big improvement, and we can clearly thank them for that.
“There are no celebrations before we actually do it in a race and in a race there are much more laps and I don’t know how much we will be able to extract over the race distance but over one lap it is clearly a big step forward.”
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