AlphaTauri needs to inject some momentum into its faltering 2021 Formula 1 season but on paper this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix does not look like the place to do that.
The sister Red Bull team started the season with Pierre Gasly qualifying fifth at the opening two grands prix, but it failed to translate that performance into big results in Bahrain or at Imola and then slumped at the last two events.
A difficult Portuguese Grand Prix weekend was put down to an inherent slow-speed corner weakness in the AT02.But the return to a higher-speed, higher-downforce circuit for the Spanish Grand Prix failed to revive its early-season form.
In fact, using the supertime method to reflect each team’s fastest lap as a percentage of the outright best, AlphaTauri posted its largest performance deficit of the season in Spain.
AlphaTauri’s 2021 performance so far
| Grand Prix | Supertime | Rank |
| Bahrain | 100.91% | 4th |
| Imola | 100.51% | 5th |
| Portugal | 101.39% | 7th |
| Spain | 101.62% | 7th |
Gasly grabbed a single point at Algarve and Barcelona while rookie team-mate Yuki Tsunoda is yet to finish in the top 10 since the season opener in Bahrain, and Gasly admitted after the Spanish race that “the performance is not where we want it to be”.
“We seem to have really lost in the last two races,” Gasly admitted. “We’re clearly not in the fight with McLaren and Ferrari and I think we dropped back in the order.
“We need to understand exactly why because there is some potential. We just seem to have lost it slightly in the last two races.
“Ultimately, we are just lacking pace compared to the first two races. And that’s something we need to understand because we just dropped back in the order compared to the start of the year.”
AlphaTauri appeared to be vying with McLaren and Ferrari to have F1’s third-fastest car at the start of the season but Gasly’s clumsy first-lap incident that broke his front wing in Bahrain and a poor strategy choice from the team in Imola meant he scored far fewer points at its two strongest races so far.
It has just 10 points from the opening four events and was jumped by Alpine in the constructors’ standings after the Portuguese GP despite the French manufacturer starting the year much slower.
Gasly said ahead of the Spanish GP that AlphaTauri knew it would struggle in Portugal given the track layout. And he admitted that would bode poorly for Monaco, the slowest circuit on the calendar, and the following race in Azerbaijan, if AlphaTauri could not find a breakthrough.
“We tried quite many things in terms of set-up to solve the issues and unfortunately it didn’t really work,” he said of the Portuguese round. “So it’s probably something a bit more fundamental which kind of takes slightly longer than we would like.
“If we would have a similar track another time, we would try different other set-ups and try to see if we could get a bit more performance.
“Because we will have Monaco, Baku, really low-speed tracks, and I think we need to find more performance in these kinds of conditions.”
AlphaTauri has a great point-scoring record at Monaco from its Toro Rosso years, finishing in the top 10 there every season from 2015-2019, including a double points finish in the most recent race.
Gasly said the team was still in the process of understanding where its 2021 weakness at low-speed derived from, but is also wary that, at a time AlphaTauri has a key weakness to address, Ferrari and McLaren have made “a big step forward” in improving their respective packages.
He was optimistic in Spain that the team could find a solution to improve its fortune for this weekend’s race in the principality, but if it doesn’t then the combination of what he calls the “weak point” of the AT02 and the fact AlphaTauri seems to have fallen away from Ferrari and McLaren in general is a big threat to its chances.
“Monaco I do feel that it’s such a particular track that might be slightly different,” Gasly said in Spain. “But there are clear areas where we need to improve.
“The car is not bad, it has potential, but we haven’t really managed to make it work everywhere and all type of corners and get a smooth sort of car balance all around the lap.
“We always have strengths and quite big weaknesses, which I think we should improve.
“I believe we’re going to make some step forward in the coming race.”
