Gasly after tough first half of season: 'Reflecting in summer'

Alpine erased all the spotlight at the last Grand Prix before the summer break. In part because of performance(Pierre Gasly finished the Sprint third), but mostly because of the announced departure of team boss Otmar Szafnauer, sporting director Alan Permane and technical boss Pat Fry (although the latter is leaving voluntarily).

With his third place in the Sprint, Gasly managed to give the leavers a nice farewell. At the Grand Prix, he and Esteban Ocon managed to impress less. They finished 11th and eighth respectively. Gasly was unlucky early in the race to find himself behind slow-driving Oscar Piastri. "It was going to be amazing until I saw Oscar like 150 kph slower than everyone else and I was just stuck behind so I slammed the brake and I just waited for a gap to pass him, but it was just a train passing by and it was very painful to watch one by one all the guys passing me and from I think 9th or 10th I dropped to 17th so it was clearly not the start we had hoped for," Gasly said.

The Frenchman told the media, including GPblog, that the Alpine is getting better and better. But: "But there's still quite a few things missing to really suit my driving and stuff that I need to rely on and that I really want to kind of get from the car to naturally be at the 101% every single lap and the moment there are certain things I want to do with the car which I can't really get out of it, so it's always stuff that we kind of work on but ultimately this year's car is what it is, I think it's mainly in terms of feedback, the inputs are important for next year's car which I would have more input on."

Szafnauer and Permane are not going to experience all that again. They have been gently shown the door by Alpine. Gasly did not want to go too deeply into the events of the past few days. "Well personally I've got to focus on what I do on the track and try to bring the best I can from every single session. That's what I've been focusing on obviously, I think everyone's disappointed with the start of the year, we didn't perform straight from the start as well as we should have and there haven't really been the progress that we all would have liked but obviously."

"I've just joined six months ago, I don't know what's the past history and it's quite a lot of changes also for me, just coming in the team and relying on new people and then all these changes but yeah, I think everybody needs to sit down and process what's happened and just refresh and start fresh in Zandvoort. I think everything's quite fresh, obviously sit down during the summer and go over the all of that but we try to just stay focused on the job to do this weekend. I'm glad we managed to get a trophy, even if it's a small one, glad we managed to get a trophy yesterday for the last weekend of Alan and Otmar and Pat and at least it makes some positive memories," Gasly said.