Pierre Gasly hopes to maintain the impressive pace he showed in practice for the rest of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend.
The AlphaTauri driver finished in the top five in both Friday sessions at Spa-Francorchamps, only fractionally behind fourth-placed Fernando Alonso at the front of the midfield.
And for Gasly, that was the best possible way to return to the track after a four-week break.
“I must say, coming back from summer break, we haven’t run the car for a few weeks and the engineers and mechanics have been away, it’s good to restart in the best shape possible,” he told Formula1.com.
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“And that’s exactly what we did, this morning with the third [fastest] time and this afternoon with the fifth-fastest time. So a very positive start, and it’s good to see.”
Gasly is confident of further performance gains heading into Saturday but also admits the threat of rain makes the weekend tough to predict.
“There is always some extra speed to find, and we know the areas to focus on,” he said. “With the weather, we saw it today – the track condition has changed five or six times since this morning.
“So, tomorrow could be wet. We need to be prepared for all sorts of conditions, but at least the baseline we have seems to work.
“I’m just happy to be back driving again, and hopefully we can confirm our good pace tomorrow.”
