Pierre Gasly, Red Bull, Paul Ricard, 2019

Gasly’s point-less finish “frustrating” for Horner

2019 French Grand Prix

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Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitted Pierre Gasly’s French Grand Prix result was “frustrating”.

Gasly finished 11th having started ninth, one of two drivers on the soft tyres. Horner said his driver started the race well on the unfancied tyres, but lost ground after his pit stop.

“He did a good job in the first stint on the red tyre,” Horner told Sky. “And then we got him track position.

“[It was] a fantastic stop by the boys, the fastest of the afternoon, I had it at 1.9 stationary. So we got him track position to Daniel [Ricciardo] and then he just didn’t get going on that harder tyre. And then lost out to the other guys as well.”

Gasly was passed by Ricciardo and lost places to Kimi Raikkonen and Nico Hulkenberg.

“It’s frustrating not to have that car in the points. I’m sure we’ll have a good look at that with him.”

Max Verstappen finished seven places ahead of Gasly in fourth. “We managed to split [the Ferraris] which was the maximum Max could do today,” said Horner. “He drove the wheels off the car, another very mature drive.

“We’re just missing that sort of two or three tenths at the moment. But hopefully it’s in the pipeline.”

Update: Gasly was subsequently promoted to 10th, and the final point, following Ricciardo’s penalties.

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Keith Collantine
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68 comments on “Gasly’s point-less finish “frustrating” for Horner”

  1. They ditched others for a lot less than Gasly’s horrible performances.

    1. And here they are paying for it

    2. At least he’s not trashing the car

  2. For me, he’s the biggest flop of this race. Embarrassing, very embarrassing.

    1. @jerejj

      I agree. He was awful. He couldn’t even battle the Renaults or Mclaren.

      I think Gasly was lucky to be paired against Hartley in his first season. If he was up against a slightly more formidable driver.. He wouldn’t even have made it his 2nd season in the sport.

      1. @todfod he’s also lucky that there’s no one with the credentials he had racing at Toro Rosso at the moment. If there was another Gasly in the Toro Rosso doing Toro Rosso-like performances, he’d be on his way out if he isn’t already.

      2. He wasn’t even impressive against Hartley, who had a lot more bad luck.

  3. Swap him with Kvyat now!

    1. Gasly problem is likely in mechanical side. Just like was it was in Toro Rosso back in time when Sainz was having good car and Kvyat isn’t. In the very last race Kvyat has got that Sainz cars and that was the best race for Toro Rosso back in that season.

  4. Why did redbull put him on softs for starts for two time in a row? Everybody knows it’s not preferred strategy.

    1. GtisBetter (@)
      23rd June 2019, 17:30

      Didn’t he had to do a stint on softs in qualy to prevent him losing out on Q3?

    2. Because he’s so slow he can’t make it to Q3 with harder tyres

      1. He would have been better off if he started 11th then.

    3. Because the top 10 have to start on the tyre they qualified on & Gasly had to use the soft’s to get into Q3 as his run on the mediums wasn’t fast enough.

      1. Shoudl read ‘qualified on in Q2’.

      2. But as Raikkonen said, maybe having him in Q2 with own choice of tyres, that’d be better than P10.

    4. ZUKMAN, because, as others have noted, Gasly wouldn’t have qualified in the top 10 if he hadn’t used those soft tyres to begin with.

      What it really underlines was just how fundamentally bad Gasly’s pace was this weekend – even most of the midfield runners were confident of beating Gasly in qualifying whilst on the theoretically slower medium tyre, and did so by a large margin – Sainz was 0.4s faster on the mediums than Gasly was on soft tyres.

      It might not have been the preferred strategy, but his pace on the soft tyres wasn’t the problem – he was actually reasonably competitive on those tyres, and his first stint was about the same length as those on the medium tyres around him. It was his subsequent stint on the hard tyres that was poor, and there he doesn’t really have any excuse – his tyres were the same age as the drivers around him, but he was nowhere near their pace.

  5. Gasly is the Kubica of the big three.

    At least Kubica has his disability and a bad car to justify his lack of pace, while Gasly has no excuses.

    Also I dont see Kvyat being promoted to his place. To me, they are going to put Alex Albon there.

    1. Ben Rowe (@thegianthogweed)
      23rd June 2019, 19:27

      But Kvyat has overall looked better than Albon this year. Especially in recent races.

      Silly as this sounds, I think they are more likely to give Kvyat another chance rather than yet again go for an inexperienced driver. Verstappen worked out very well, but Kvyat and Gasly in their 2nd season and first for Red Bull didn’t do great – at least so far for Gasly. Kvyat certainly looked better in 2015 than Gasly is now.

      Kvyat is a lot more experienced now and his turn around looks pretty obvious. His incident in China looked much worse than it was. Any driver might have had a lock up like that. It wasn’t intentional and he didn’t look to be going too fast. He just locked up and due to the lack of downforce from other cars ahead, he unfortunately hit them and was unlucky enough to damage 2 cars. Other than that, he’s looked solid this year. If he keeps this up, unless Gasly can improve or Albon shows extremely strong signs like Verstappen did early on, I think Kvyat could well be back at Red Bull next year. Bit of a bold prediction, but I think it may well happen.

    2. Kubica in his car will eat Max for breakfast

      1. The northpole.
        23rd June 2019, 22:27

        Certainly. He will eat Max up. In his car. There is room enough. In fact he will do it one handidly. Omnomnom.

      2. Calm down. Kubica can’t even get within half a second of an unproven and relatively unheralded rookie.

        1. Current F2 championship up there in talent with Leclerc and Norris is ‘unproven’???

      3. Wonderful.

        Gasly is nothing but dead weight right now, putting Kubica up against a top driver in his last outing would at least be novel.

        1. @thegianthogweed

          If I were Kvyat I would stay as far as possible from the main team, mainly because he will be considered just a temporary replacement until Albon or the next big thing in RBR shows up to take his place again and demote him to Toro Rosso or even out of F1 again.

          If I were Kvyat i would search for another team, like Haas (i doubt an american team would sign a russian driver with all the tensions there is now), Renault or even Alfa Romeo.

          Also, I doubt Kubica would eat Max for breakfast. He is too slow right now, and now we can see why Renault hasn’t sign him up at 2017 after Palmer failed with them.

          I like Kubica, he is a nice chap, but to me, he will not return to F1 after the summer break.

  6. Somehow I feel like Max is making the redbull look so much better than it truly is

    Sure Gasly is not doing a great job but that is car isn’t very good

    1. Lol of course not max is were the red bull is actually at, max just has nobody to fight with this season just like for vettel in 2015 and people think hes doing better then he actually is

      1. So a driver is only as good as his car and the losing teammate is just driving bad? I don’t believe that.

        1. @anunaki, well, yes – a driver can only be as good as the theoretical maximum performance limit of the car: it’s not as if Max can magically make the car produce 10% more downforce or increase the grip coefficient of the tyres just because he is sat in the seat. There do seem to be certain handling characteristics of his car that are not to Gasly’s liking, but he doesn’t seem to be adapting to those characteristics that well.

          Personally, I thought that Gasly didn’t really stand out as a driver when in junior series – his GP2 championship felt more like a case of a “Prema Championship” – and I do feel that his performance at Toro Rosso in 2018 was flattered by the low expectations of the team and the chassis perhaps being underrated by more than it should have been, plus having a weak stop gap team mate that meant Gasly was probably getting more support from the team than he normally would have been.

          In that respect, I am more inclined to question why Gasly is off the pace. Bottas got trashed fairly heavily last season for his performance in the latter part of 2018 – I believe you yourself criticised him for his performances at times – and yet Bottas was, comparatively speaking, not as far off the pace as Gasly has been relative to Verstappen.

          Similarly, when Massa was driving against Alonso at Ferrari, Massa came under criticism at times for being off Alonso’s pace, and yet even with difficult and poor cars such as the F2012, and with Ferrari making Alonso their leading driver as well, Massa was still more competitive against Alonso than Gasly has been against Verstappen.

          If, in previous instances, most fans would describe a driver as seriously underperforming – even if they had a better relative performance than Gasly has shown and with more difficult cars than Gasly has had – why, then, are people more inclined to blame the car than the driver this time around?

        2. One can not go faster than the car….
          Then he will end up crossing the line before the car comes along…..
          It will allways be the slowest one that is underperforming!

        3. Yeah, I’m sure that Lando Norris, a rookie, easily outpacing Gasly in France proves that the McLaren was much better than the Red Bull….NOT.

          Max undoubtedly driving extremely well, but Gasly is just slow. I don’t care how great one driver is. If his teammate cannot at least occasionally beat him, that tells us that the teammate is rubbish.

    2. I think its 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. As much as I’m not a huge fan, Max is clearly driving unbelievably well at the moment (think the Red Bull is realistically the third fastest car). It’s also clear that Gasly is nowhere near the pace, and it shows how one season against a pretty poor teammate is not enough to judge a driver.

  7. I think it’s game over for Gasly, at least at Red Bull… since the beginning of the year, Horner was « politely » supportive, but now it’s over. And indeed Pierre’s performance was dreadfully this weekend. Honestly I feel for him, because his perf in other series were really good. I don’t believe in the fact that a driver who is good in F2 and super formula, and does a good first year in F1 is in fact “not f1 materials”. I think in modern F1, a driver with limited experience that drives a car that does not suit his driving style just cannot cut it (tyre management and the lots). Young drivers needs to be lucky in the first 2-3 years to get equipment that fit their needs. Otherwise, its bye bye blue birds…. Bye Bye Nasr, Werhlein, Vandoorne, Gasly ?, Giovinazzi? Bit of a shame really, missing the old days where drivers were schooled in F1…

    1. Thing is, who is waiting in the wings? Noone exciting is coming up through the lower series. Old hands De Vries and Latifi are leading F2. I wonder what new drivers will enter the series next year, other than Ocon. I guess Wehrlein and Vandoorne still have their super licenses. Who else is there?

  8. If only Red Bull were able to manage two good drivers properly instead of putting all their eggs in the most marketable basket… If they hadn’t alienated Sainz (Verstappen’s equal) then they could have had 2 great drivers in their cars instead of scraping the barrel of their failing young driver programme.

    1. Sainz (Verstappen’s equal)… Thanks, now at least i had something to laugh about today.

      1. Well, in the course of their one-and-a-little-bit seasons together, it was 12-11 to Max in qualifying. Pretty equal. Sainz lost more points due to bad luck, otherwise they would have been neck-and-neck in that score too. He maybe wasn’t as ruthless in racing as Verstappen but was every bit as quick. Can you say that about Gasly? No.

        1. How old were they at the time? Right now, Max would wipe the floor with Sainz. Even Norris has proven to be slightly faster right off the bat.

          1. Age doesn’t really matter. No, he wouldn’t. And Norris has not proven to be faster.

    2. “equal”?? LMAO

    3. I would not say “equal”, but Saiz would have been a great team player in Red Bull. It is time to remember what Horner said at the begining of the season: “Carlos is a talented driver and I am happy to see him continue this career in F1 with McLaren. But we had a feeling that Pierre had more potential with us.”

      1. Great team player? Did you see how toxic it was in TR when Verstappen and Sainz were team-mates?
        Goodluck with that

        1. Sorry, I did not catch that toxic relationship when they were team-mates. Can you share any proof, actual facts or events about it? Good luck with that. By the way, I’m not interested in rummors or gossips. Carlos has got along well with all his 5 different team mates, no complaints at all. However, you can ask Ricciardo or Ocon about Max.

          1. I forgot to say that Max Verstappen is not a F1 team. Sainz would have collected a lot of points for Red Bull, that was my point. Max being hard to deal with (or “toxic” as you unintentionally said) is another matter.

  9. There is not a lot of enthousiasm by other drivers to be Ves team mate. He can make everybody look bad.

    1. No doubt it must be a scary prospect, but Ricciardo did OK.

      1. Only the first year together. Last year he was crushed on all accounts.

        1. Like number of pole positions. DR was hardly crushed last year, Max drove brilliantly in the latter half of the year, and Dans race were more often than not hampered by technical issues, either in quali or the race. This year Max has again been brilliant, but he’s being flattered by a team mate who just can’t seem to come to grips with the rb15

        2. 2017 didn’t happened, then?
          200 points agains 168.

          Both heavily affected by reliability. Verstappen on the first half of the season, Ricciardo on the second one.

        3. “Only the first year together. Last year he was crushed on all accounts.” – Cough cough. It was RIC who did the winning. All 3 seasons together. The only RB driver who was considered a WDC contender last year. For example, at this moment, after the 8th GP, he was 3rd in the standings.

    2. It is not just Max.
      RBR kicks drivers out like crazy.

      I think even Ocon wouldn’t want to drive for them.

      1. William Jones
        24th June 2019, 0:10

        Ocon it probably looking at a Mercedes seat and no matter how realistic that is, I think he will remain loyal for that chance.

    3. “There is not a lot of enthousiasm by other drivers to be Ves team mate.” – Ok then, give me a couple of names with references (links for example) by which they declare to be unwilling to drive for one of the top-three teams.
      You will not find one. Even GAS signed.

  10. It would be one thing if he was the worst of the top teams but somewhat close, no he’s miles behind, Max was more than a minute ahead of him, he may as well be driving a Toro Rosso painted like the Red Bull.

    At this time I think Gasly would not get a podium even if he drove for Mercedes.

    Any of the good drivers (RIC, RAI, HUL, SAI, NOR, MAG) would put that Red Bull at least 6th every single race, Gasly can’t even get into the points.

  11. Too bad you don’t have any other driver available, because you dismissed everyone else out of your walled garden of delights.
    Right, Mr.Horner?

    1. It was Horner. It was Helmut.

  12. I may be entirely wrong but isn’t Sainz only on loan to McLaren i.e. he still has some kind of link to RBR? Or have I imagined this.

    1. Imagined, he was on loan to Renault. But ties were cut after it was apparent they wouldn’t be bring him back into the RBR fold to sit next to VER given the tensions that arose between the two at TR.

  13. RedBull would be wise to go after Valtteri Bottas. He can be pretty fast , he’s a team player and he would be bringing the experience of having driven the Merc alongside Lewis H for 3 seasons . I know it’s not their style. Sometimes change is good.

    1. Considering that Toto is ready to poach Verstappen, maybe Red Bull would have to poach Bottas as their #1 driver and not the wingman.

      1. I doubt that would even up the pairing enough in RB.

  14. If I were Helmut Marko I would try to get Russell in the second Red Bull.

    1. I think Russel is a very big talent and overlooked at the moment. He will be much closer to Max.
      But i doubt it is a realistic prospect.

  15. How’s that patience with Gasly working out for you you @Robbie

    I told you, and everyone that Gasly wasn’t going to improve and he met the edge of his talents and was found wanting.

    Do we need any more proof that he is *rubbish*?

    Gasly is a good driver. Red Bull Racing doesn’t go good drivers. They do great ones. Max is a level above great now, but this is no excuse. Not even challenging the McLarens let alone getting overtaken on track by worse cars is utterly inexcusable.

    I said it before, and I’ll say it again, he is worse than Kvyat was when he was replaced. In fact, I’d say he is far worse now.

    1. I think everyone knew Gasly would get eaten for breakfast by Max. Even if Gasly was performing well.. He’d still get beaten throughly.. But if he’s driving poorly, then it’s just embarrassing…like it is now.

      I would be surprised if he finishes the season the Red bull. I’d expect Kvyat or Albon, depending on which of the drivers shine brighter till mid season time, to replace him at Redbull. Personally, I hope it’s Kvyat. To be partnered up against the guy who took his seat should be fun. Plus, Albon still needs to develop over a season or two before the pressure is piled on him.

  16. This was an extemely poor weekend for GAS though. He beat max in quali a fortnight ago and did relatively well in AUS, BAH, SPA and MON.

    1. This was an extemely poor weekend for GAS though. He beat max in quali a fortnight ago and did relatively well in AUS, BAH, SPA and MON.

      Australia? He finished 11th.

      Bahrain? 8th.

      Max finished 3rd and 4th respectively there.

      Only once has Gasly finished within 1 position of Max, and that was Canada. Every other race he has had other cars beat him when Max has not.

      That’s poor performance at best. To finish 6 positions behind your teammate with no car problems and a better car than those who beat you is inexcusable.

      Max has 100 points. Gasly has 37. Being outscored 3:1 is what got Stoff out of McLaren. It’s much worse than what cost Kvyat his RBR seat, and only the Kimi/Gio fight is comparable.

      Even Stroll, who is considered a bad pay driver, is closer to his teammate than someone who is meant to be at RBR on merit.

      It’s a poor weekend that hasn’t been mitigated by any really good weekends.

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