Pierre Gasly conceded that the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was \u201cpainful\u201d for the Alpine team, with the Frenchman stating that the squad had \u201cabsolutely no chance\u201d after lacking pace throughout the weekend.<\/p>\n
Having failed to score points since the Belgian Grand Prix back in July, Alpine<\/a> again came away empty-handed in Baku. The Enstone-based outfit took a gamble by splitting strategies between Gasly<\/a> and Franco Colapinto<\/a> \u2013 starting the former on the hard compound and the latter on the soft \u2013 but the move ultimately did not move the pair forwards, leading to a P18 and P19 finish.<\/p>\n Reflecting on the race afterwards, a downbeat Gasly summed up the situation by admitting: \u201cWe\u2019ve just got no pace here.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of the learnings that the team can take forward from the event \u2013 with one eye on preparing for 2026 \u2013 Gasly spoke of the importance of understanding why the A525 seemed to particularly struggle at the Baku City Circuit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cars will be very different, I think,\u201d the 29-year-old said. \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s stuff we can learn because obviously it hasn\u2019t been good at all this weekend in terms of pace, and we\u2019ve been slightly more competitive on other race tracks.<\/p>\n \u201cThis weekend we had absolutely no chance unfortunately, so there is fundamentally something on this track which we\u2019re not doing quite well and it\u2019s important to take the lessons from it.<\/p>\n \u201cBut, yeah, I must say it\u2019s a bit painful. It\u2019s painful for everyone, and I just think we\u2019ve got to keep our head down and try to work together as a team and try to find a way to get better for next weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n The Azerbaijan event was also tough for Colapinto, who was amongst those to crash in Saturday\u2019s Qualifying session<\/a>. After lining up in P16, the Argentinian\u2019s afternoon was made more difficult when he was involved in a collision with Alex Albon<\/a>, an incident that the Williams<\/a> driver was handed a 10-second time penalty for.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a tough day,\u201d Colapinto conceded. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really have any pace today and we just really struggled with the car, with the pace, and we need to keep working to get better.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course I lost a lot of time with the contact with Alex, 12 seconds I think, and then a broken front wing that gave me a lot of understeer [and a] flat spot. So it was tough, but we just had no pace and we need to get better at that.\u201d<\/p>\n