AlphaTauri was “far too slow” during Friday practice at Algarve according to team principal Franz Tost, with understeer and a lack of grip holding it back in both sessions.
Pierre Gasly was the lead AlphaTauri driver in FP2 in 12th place, lapping 0.721s off the pace. While he was sixth in FP1, the deficit to the front was fractionally bigger than in FP2 with a gap of 0.796s.
Given Gasly qualified fifth for the first two races of the season, behind only the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc in the midfield group, this was a disappointing performance – especially considering the French driver finished fifth in Portugal last year.
“We are far too slow, this is the summary,” said Tost of AlphaTauri’s performance. “We still don’t understand exactly why we haven’t performed so well in FP1 and FP2 as in Bahrain or Imola.
“We have to do a lot of work and exercises tonight to find the reasons and to find the proper setup for the car, either on the mechanical or aerodynamic side or both together to improve our performance.
“[We have] understeer problems, no grip in some corners, especially Turns 4, 11, 12, 13 where we are struggling. There was sometimes a tailwind, but the tailwind was for other cars as well.
“We simply have to change a lot on the setup hopefully to get in the right direction to come up with a car which can perform well, because we know we have a fast car.”
Gasly echoed Tost’s sentiments, with the three-and-a-half tenth pace deficit to the leading midfielder Ferrari and surprise package Alpine big enough to raise concerns about being able to reach Q2.
Having found the AlphaTauri very well-balanced and good to drive during testing and the first two race weekends in Bahrain and Imola, Gasly said the car felt unusual.
“Compared to usual we are struggling on braking and low speed and a couple of other areas where the car doesn’t seem similar to usual,” he said. “So we need to have a look at what we change compared to other tracks.
“Obviously it is a different layout, it’s different conditions. It’s very slippery here, so it might require different changes than usual.
”We’ve got to work because it’s so tight in the midfield. Two or three-tenths is worth six or seven places and we’ve got to find this time for tomorrow.”
With Yuki Tsunoda also pointing to the problem of low grip, this does hint that the problem might be getting the tyres to work at a circuit that’s lower-abrasion than Bahrain and Imola.
Tost refused to use the track surface as an excuse, stressing that it’s down to the team to find what he called “a proper solution” to its grip difficulties.
“This new asphalt is for all the others the same,” said Tost. “That means we have to find a solution so that our car is also working under these conditions, [with] maybe less grip coming from the asphalt.
“Therefore we have to find the correct setup a) from the mechanical side and b) from the aerodynamic side to come to the level of performance which we expect with this car.”
AlphaTauri has so far struggled to turn its pace into results this season, with Gasly’s two fifth places on the grid only yielding one points finish for seventh after an erroneous decision to start on wets that the team tried to reverse too late at Imola.
Tsunoda finished ninth on his F1 debut in Bahrain, but missed out on points at Imola after spinning while passing Lewis Hamilton following the red flag restart.
