Spanish GP 2021: Post-Friday practice reaction from AlphaTauri

AlphaTauri started 2021 season with an inconsistent performance so far in the first three races. Team currently sitting P6 in the constructors championship with 9 points. But Friday has been a solid outing for Italian team at Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya.

During Free Practice 1, Pierre Gasly managed to complete 26 laps while finishing the session in P7 with a Best lap time of 1:19.062 and he managed to lower his bench mark time in FP2 with a Best lap of 1:18.593. The French Man also completed session high 32 laps for AlphaTauri.

Japanese rookie Yuki Tsunoda completed 22 laps in the morning session and his best effort of 1:19.669 was good enough for P11 in a tight midfield. Tsunoda managed to complete 30 laps including best lap of 1:18.619 in the after noon session, which is good for P7 in the final classification.

Pierre Gasly :

“I think overall FP2 was a good session for us, to finish sixth shows the car is strong. The pace of the car is definitely there but the balance isn’t quite right yet, so we’ve got to make a few tweaks tonight to maximise our performance ahead of Qualifying tomorrow. Obviously, our main goal this weekend is to score points, as we’re fighting against tough opponents in the midfield pack, and I think if we can improve in the few areas that we’re struggling in we could be up for a good weekend.”

Yuki Tsunoda

“I’m happy with our performance and the pace of the car today. I’ve driven this track a lot, so I know it well, which meant I could be more confident driving from the offset, unlike in Portugal where I was having to use each session to learn the circuit. I’m very positive ahead of tomorrow. I just need to focus on my own driving and the set-up of the car before FP3 and Qualifying – this is what we will work on tonight with my engineers.”

Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer)

“Barcelona is a track that we obviously know quite a lot better than the Portuguese track, having raced and tested here so many times in the past, so we came here more confident that we could extract a good performance from the car.

In free practice one we focused on some aerodynamic testing, as we’ve got some new components here this weekend, and they all worked well which is positive. We also took the opportunity in the morning session to better understand the softer tyre performance over a short run, which helped us going into FP2 – where this analysis was our main priority for the afternoon.

I think we managed to extract a reasonable performance from the Softs around a lap here, it’s always a compromise between having understeer at the start of the lap versus oversteer at the end, so I think there’s still some more work we can do ahead of tomorrow but overall the performance there is quite positive. We then completed a long run, which was all about tyre management and understanding what our strategy should be for the race on Sunday.”