'It Was Really Shocking' Says Gasly After Qatar Sprint Race

Sunday, 08 October 2023 at 09:53

Updated at Tuesday, 10 October 2023 at 22:33

Alpine F1 driver Pierre Gasly gives insight into his sprint race experience during the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix at Lusail International Circuit.

Throughout the 2023 Formula One season, there have been numerous races where tire degradation was expected to be a problem; however, in the end, drivers were able to deal with track conditions and nurture their tires most of the time. This wasn't the case during the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix Sprint Race.

The sprint saw mainly two tire strategies being used by teams, either to go all 19 laps on soft or medium. Drivers like Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc, Fernando Alonso, George Russell, and Pierre Gasly went for the soft tire compound.

All these drivers had a great start to the sprint, though, they would soon start to struggle just after a few laps and started falling down the order. Pierre Gasly who started the sprint from 11th place finished ninth in the end, but as he shared during the post-sprint interview, he was not happy with the strategy.

"Can't really recall a race with that much degradation. It was really shocking I'm not gonna lie. With insight, it is always easy to say what was the right tire to choose. Looking now, the medium was definitely way better but we didn't expect to face such a big degradation."

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Free Practice One session and Qualifying were not enough for teams to gather enough data and to understand how much the soft tire compound could last. Even though it was not clear, nobody expected such a harsh degradation. Gasly explained:

"With the information we had, one FP1 where we didn't use the soft. Qualifying, we did a maximum two laps on the same set so we didn't really have enough info to really anticipate that. At least for tomorrow, we know what to expect."