Pierre Gasly has labelled his weekend at the Turkish Grand Prix as “embarrassing”, with AlphaTauri walking away from the event empty-handed for only the second time this year.
After qualifying in 15th place, Gasly was ordered to start at the back of the field after his team notified their intention to replace power unit elements, before opting against the change despite disassembling the car under parc ferme conditions.
Although he made some progress during the race in wet conditions, the Frenchman could only reach as far as 13th place, crossing the line behind team-mate Daniil Kvyat.
“The whole weekend, not only the race, the whole weekend was really bad,” Gasly reflected.
“We had very poor performance in the wet and honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing because we are just so slow with the Wets, with the Inters.
“It was the same in qualifying. 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 Saturday morning. We have to work for the next races.”
Before the rain arrived on Saturday, Gasly ended a dry FP2 session inside the top 10, albeit in unusually tricky conditions, with the recently resurfaced track offering little grip to the drivers.
Gasly says that AlphaTauri already understood some of the problems it had soon after qualifying, but was unable to make changes for the race.
“On the dry it was fine, it was obviously very unique conditions that I didn’t expect we were going to face,” Gasly said.
“But for all of us, we need to understand what went wrong and what didn’t work. We already have some answers from Saturday but we could not make the changes for Sunday.
“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.”
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