Gasly explains his lack of Red Bull pace

Editor
Pierre Gasly says his confidence with the RB15 is growing despite a DNF in Baku.

Pierre Gasly says his confidence with the RB15 is growing despite a DNF in Baku.

Pierre Gasly has said he was more in testing mode during the first two practice sessions ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix.

The Frenchman has been unable to establish himself at the sharp end of the timesheet since moving to Red Bull and there was nearly a second between him and his team-mate Max Verstappen in FP2 at the Shanghai International Circuit.

But, Gasly is happy with his day’s work, which included a lot of testing, and said his hot lap during his qualifying simulation was also not a true reflection of the RB15’s pace.

“I always want more, but I’m quite happy with the programme today,” Gasly told reporters.

“I think we have a good direction and Max showed that the car has good potential.

“We tested a lot of things between FP1 and FP2, we were pushing the development as much as we could, so now we need to analyse every part we used today.

“In FP2 I had quite a big moment in the third sector on the fastest lap and lost a bit of time, so it’s actually not really representative for the potential of the car.

“I think we need to focus on tomorrow now and improve my set-up.”

Verstappen, meanwhile, improved from P4 in FP1 to P3 in FP2 and was a couple of tenths behind the leading pair of Valtteri Bottas and Sebastian Vettel.

The Dutchman has noticed an improvement after Red Bull realised they got the set-up wrong in Bahrain.

“We have a good balance in the car and not too many issues, so I’m pretty happy,” he added.

“Of course there was a question mark coming here after Bahrain but we were all quite confident that if we could solve the issue we would be a lot closer, which I think we have shown today.”

Follow all the action from the Chinese Grand Prix with the PlanetF1 live centre