Pierre Gasly expects AlphaTauri can fight at the front of Formula 1’s midfield at every track in 2021.
The sister Red Bull team was a surprise of the opening race weekend in Bahrain as Gasly qualified fifth, while rookie teammate Yuki Tsunoda stormed through the field to ninth.
Unfortunately, a broken front wing after contact with Daniel Ricciardo meant the Frenchman was unable to show just how competitive AlphaTauri is in race trim.
But… “I think [with] the pace we’ve shown all weekend we are in the mix with the Ferrari and the McLaren and that’s positive,” Gasly said. “I think we’re clearly going to fight with them and on all tracks.”
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AlphaTauri technical director Jody Egginton was also optimistic about the performance of the AT02.
“We recovered a reasonable chunk of downforce,” he explained via RaceFans.
“Now we’re trying to work on increasing the operating window, giving the car a wider operating window aerodynamically to work in, especially in low-speed. Then the driver can exploit that and we’ll go quicker.
“It’s also exploiting more performance from the areas of the car which have been affected by the regulation changes, and making sure that the changes, as we develop that, we don’t upset something else, really. So it’s just rolling development.
“We’ll have some new bits in Imola, we’ll have some new bits in Portugal, we’ll have some new bits in Spain. It’s incremental, there’s no headline-grabbers, but by Spain, we should have a nice step forward.”