Gasly calls for team to revise strategy decisions

Pierre Gasly AlphaTauri
Pierre Gasly says he and his team need to revise their strategy calls, feeling it cost them a better result at the Austrian Grand Prix.
The Frenchman headed into the race hopeful of scoring big points after qualifying in P6 with yet another excellent Saturday performance.
However, he ultimately only left the Red Bull Ring with two points in the back after dropping down the order and crossing the line in P9.
The reason for this, he feels, is that the decision was made to start on the softest compound tyre and commit to a two-stop race.
“We thought we will probably benefit a bit more from this two-stop, and it turned out that it was not ideal,” he said afterwards.
“Looking at the Aston Martin on the same strategy, looking at Yuki [Tsunoda] and myself, we seemed to struggle a bit more. But we still came really close to the Ferraris, which had a very good race pace last weekend.”
“We had to commit Friday night. We didn’t feel like we had the pace to do it [on medium]. In terms of strategy, we need to look at the numbers and see our approach to the weekend.
“But McLaren made it work, Daniel [Ricciardo] starting from P13, managed to come back quite well with the one-stop. So there were some positives clearly to do the one-stop, but we’ll have to revise it.”
“After five laps I was already really struggling with the rear. I tried to extend [but it] wasn’t really the tyre to race on, so that’s why we switched quite early on on the hard tyre.”
Maybe no schnitzel for today😔
— 角田裕毅/Yuki Tsunoda (@yukitsunoda07) July 4, 2021
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Things may not have gone perfectly for Gasly, but he did at least fare much better than team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.
Starting in P7, the Japanese driver also lost a lot of places and wasn’t able to fight his way back into the top 10.
He says he knew Sunday would be more difficult than Saturday but that his pace on race day was even worse than he feared.
“Qualifying was good but the race pace was horrible,” he said in the paddock afterwards.
“So we’ll have to analyse why that is. I was expecting that it was going to be tough but I didn’t expect this much.”
He made life harder for himself by picking up two penalties for crossing the pit-entry line but didn’t have too much to say on that topic.
“Yeah, I think… I don’t why,” he said when asked why he struggled with that.
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