Pierre Gasly believes his recent form at Toro Rosso is proving he needs “to have the stars aligned” in order to perform at the best of his potential.

Red Bull demoted Gasly back to Toro Rosso over the summer break after a difficult opening to the season resulted in his being replaced by Alexander Albon replacing him. While Albon has finished every race in the top six since, Gasly himself has picked up three top 10 finishes in the five races since returning to Toro Rosso, and after outscoring Daniil Kvyat in that time, said it is a sign that multiple factors influence his performance.

“I think there are many (reasons) – how do we say in French – we ‘need to have the stars aligned’ to really get the best out of the package you have,” Gasly said. “And as I’ve said, there are a couple of things that I think I could’ve done, and we could’ve done better, with Red Bull, but yeah, I don’t really want to come back on this topic.

“I think now I just want to focus on Toro Rosso and really extracting the maximum out of this package, which is what we did (in Japan), but now we need to do the same in the next couple of weekends.”

Gasly finished eighth in Japan, and although it matches his result from Singapore, he rates it his best performance since returning to Toro Rosso, coming after Naoki Yamamoto drove his car during FP1 and FP3 was cancelled.

“With the way of the weekend, without driving in FP1, FP2 was the only session in Suzuka, and it’s a difficult track, so, to get all your marks and get the car where you want… we didn’t have much time and it wasn’t the best preparation of the weekend, but in the end we managed to be ninth in FP2, ninth in qualifying and eighth in the race,” he said.

“So, definitely the most complete weekend so far with Toro Rosso, and every weekend seems to be going better and better. Also the way we work with the engineers, I’m really happy with, how we managed to evolve during the weekend.”