Pierre Gasly, AlphaTauri Formula 1 driver, claims season 2022 was “quite far away” from team’s expectations. Unfortunately, the team only managed to score 35 points on the constructors championship.
In 2021, Gasly led AlphaTauri to its the best season since its inception as Toro Rosso. He led the team to highest score card of 142 points on constructors’ championship standing of sixth place.
However, team could not manage to exploit 2022 regulations and it slipped to ninth place. Gasly scored 23 points while his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda scored only 12 points accumulating to 35.
Gasly felt difficulty with quantifying the progress he made through-out the season 2022. He claims it was really difficult to maximise the AT03 car potential keeping its struggles under new regulations.
“From my side, what I can feel, it’s more the fact of working. And trying to maximise a car which didn’t have the same potential as 2021,” Gasly told in an end-of-season interview.
“It’s not easy, also trying to keep the motivation in the engineering room, with the guys trying to keep the focus of everyone to minimise the mistakes.
“Because at the end, even if you do the same sport and the same season, the dynamic is quite different. Especially last year was amazing for everyone, and we had the most successful year.
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“There was quite a lot of expectations from this year. And it’s fair to say we’ve been quite far away from what we had expected. Or what we had wished for.”
This year becomes only the second full season that Gasly had to conclude without making it on to the podium, since his F1 debut. The Frenchman could only managed to score fifth place in Azerbaijan.
This season marked the end of Gasly’s engagement with AlphaTauri. He is all set to join Alpine in 2023, where he will replace Fernando Alonso. The Spanish driver will be replacing Sebastian Vettel at Aston Martin.
Gasly responded to a question whether this had been his toughest seasons so far. He said: “In a way, probably yes, considering that I have more experience and I have experienced good and less good [times], more or less success with the team.
“This year with the change of regulations, unfortunately we didn’t manage to capitalise on this opportunity. There were for sure some difficulties from it, but I think some other teams, in fairness, did a better job than we did.
“We didn’t really get our opportunities from this change.”
