Pierre Gasly ‘confident’ Alpine can extract ‘decent performance’ from their latest upgrades in Baku

Pierre Gasly hopes the new Alpine upgrades will help them take a step forward at the Azerbaijan GP weekend. The French manufacturer has planned upgrades for the Azerbaijan GP, Miami GP and Imola GP which are speculated to make them six tenths quicker.

Asked by Sportskeeda how optimistic he was about the upgrades ahead of the Azerbaijan GP, Pierre Gasly replied:

“So well it is always the same story where, there’s what we bring and depends what others are bringing as well on the weekends. We’ll have to see what’s on the other teams. I think it’s relatively it’s a different floor.

"We are confident it should bring some decent performance and as I said when I see the performance we had in Melbourne. Again it is a different track but we saw in Jeddah we were less competitive, in Melbourne we were pretty competitive, Bahrain as well.

"We’ll see what we get here but I’m pretty hopeful it’s gonna bring us closer to the pack ahead”

Pierre Gasly believes they were competitive in Melbourne and Bahrain but lacked performance in Saudi Arabia. However, the former AlphaTauri driver was confident and hopeful the upgrades would work and help them close the gap to the front.

The Frenchman is confident the upgrades will help them but was not sure how they would stack up against their rivals, as it depends on what others would be bringing to their car.

---

Pierre Gasly is uncertain about the upgrades on Alpine giving them a significant advantage

Hoping the upgrades will work at Baku, Pierre Gasly claims it is difficult to predict whether their new car upgrades will give them a significant advantage over their rivals. Oblivious about what other teams had brought to the Azerbaijan GP weekend, the Frenchman was cautiously optimistic about predicting the outcome for Sunday or promising any performance improvements.

Asked by Sportskeeda if the upgrades were going to be a significant leap from the last few weekends, the Alpine driver said:

“I hope so, but once again if others do not improve yes it is going to be significant but if everyone improves then might be smaller than what it actually is. I don’t want to (predict), I want see it on the race track, we will see lap time wise how much we closed (gap) to the guys ahead of us. Hopefully it’s going to work well here.”

Despite the upgrades, Pierre Gasly suffered a hydraulics issue in the free practice session ahead of the qualifying in Azerbaijan. In the qualifying, the 28 year old got knocked out in the firsts qualifying session itself, while his teammate Esteban Ocon was knocked out in the second session.

Given that Alpine were optimistic about catching up to the Mercedes and Aston Martin, it will be interesting to see where they stack up over the sprint Saturday and in the race in Baku.