Red Bull bosses are getting tougher with Pierre Gasly over his results despite insisting he will see out 2019 at the team.
His strong weekend at Silverstone now appears a distant memory after another tough race in Hungary where a bad start left him struggling to come through the upper midfield pack.
Indeed, as teammate Max Verstappen led around 60 of the 70 laps of the Hungaroring, Gasly would come home a distant seventh behind Carlos Sainz.
“We shouldn’t be racing Saubers and McLarens, we need him to be racing Ferraris and Mercedes’,” team boss Christian Horner told RaceFans.
“Everything we can do to try and help them achieve that is what we’ll do.
“Our intention is to leave him the car until the end of the year, but we desperately need to see him realising more of the potential of the car,” he added to Sky Sports.
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“I think he really needs to take some time out during the summer break, reflect on the first half of the season and take the lessons from that into the second half of the year.
“It’s vital for us if we are to stand any chance of catching Ferrari that we have him finishing further ahead.”
Red Bull also pointed out that Gasly’s poor performance also contributed to Mercedes being able to attempt the two-stop strategy which ultimately won Lewis Hamilton Sunday’s race in Budapest.
“The problem is he’s not in the mix at all,” Horner stated. “So it’s not like if Lewis said he was going to come out you know behind him or anything like that.
“But today both Mercedes and Red Bull had ‘one-legged’ races with the team-mates out of contention.”
The 23-year-old is taking the comments on board and is vowing to use the summer to come back stronger.
“So I think it is good for everyone to have a break now, switch off and also review the first few months: What went well, and what we could have done better with the guys, and yeah, just come back stronger for the second part of the season,” he explained.
“I think for sure there’s been a lot of lessons learned since the beginning of the year. There is still some more to do, but yeah, we’ll take the time to make sure we come back sharper for the second part of the season.”
