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Gasly suffers ‘shocking’ failure chasing Bottas
Pierre Gasly was hit by a “shocking” front wing failure as he pushed to try and beat Valtteri Bottas in qualifying at the Qatar Grand Prix.
Bottas was sitting third behind teammate Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen as the final runs in Q3 were taking place, with Gasly fourth having been in the top four throughout every practice session. The AlphaTauri driver ran slightly wide at the penultimate corner and his front wing broke, falling under the car and puncturing his right-front tire, preventing him from completing his lap.
https://twitter.com/F1/status/1462113510159110150
“Qualifying has been amazing, the whole weekend so far has been really, really good,” Gasly said. “This track, I think, is one of my favorites as well --just driving, nice car balance, we are able to really push to the limit and it's been really great to drive here.
“The last lap in Q3, I was improving by 1.5 tenths, so I think we were very close to Valtteri -- I don't know if he was improving or not but our lap was coming together really well. On the outside of Turn 15 I pushed a bit more, it was quite shocking inside of the car to lose the whole front wing and just blew the whole front-right tire, so that was it.
“At the end of the day we did our job, qualified fourth behind the two top teams and it's been a really impressive weekend from our team so far.”
Gasly admits the latest failure is not a massive surprise given similar issues in previous races for AlphaTauri, although he didn’t think he’d gone wide enough in the corner to risk such a problem.
“We know our front wing is really weak compared to others -- I lost it in Bahrain, I lost it in Monza, I lost it in Sochi over the different curbs, so it just seems to be really fragile. I need to review it -- it didn't seem like I went super wide on it but clearly it just broke suddenly.”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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