Pierre Gasly believes AlphaTauri had superior speed to Renault’s Daniel Ricciardo at Imola before his hopes of a podium were extinguished by a water pressure issue.
AlphaTauri engineers spotted a water pressure issue, caused by a weld failure, prior to the start of the race, which it attempted to resolve on the starting grid.
Although Gasly was able to take the start from fourth position the team opted to retire the car after a handful of laps due to the persistent problem.
“That one was quite hard,” Gasly stated. “Especially at our [AlphaTauri’s home] race in Imola, the whole weekend was going so well until now, so sad to retire.
“The guys spotted a drop in water pressure already on the laps to the grid.
“They tried everything on the grid to fix it. Unfortunately it didn’t work out which meant we had to retire after a couple of laps.”
Gasly dropped back to fifth place on the opening lap of the race, having being squeezed towards the grass at Turn 2, losing a spot to Ricciardo.
The 24-year-old remained behind Ricciardo until he was retired, leaving him confident that he could have beaten the Renault driver, who scored his second podium of the year on Sunday.
“I had a great start, the reaction time was really good,” Gasly said.
“[I] tried to go alongside Lewis [Hamilton] but he decided to close quite hard and I had to back out of it.
“After that we were running in P5. The car was so fast all weekend, I felt good behind Daniel, I think we had slightly more pace than them.
“There was clearly a top five to fight. On such a weekend for our home race, it feels quite hard but that’s motorsport unfortunately.”
