Pierre Gasly insists Red Bull aren’t getting ahead of themselves despite a notable day of testing in Barcelona on two fronts.
The Frenchman posted the fastest tyre-corrected time of the winter so far with a 1m17.7s on the C3 tyres, a third-of-a-second clear of Ferrari’s quickest time on that tyre last week.
And it was also another completely error-free eight hours of running as Gasly managed the greatest distance for a single driver at 132 laps.
“I think [the mood within the team] is good but we should not get too excited, it’s only pre-season testing,” he commented later.
“Everybody is hiding [their performance] so we just need to try and focus on ourselves and the program we have but so far it’s been good. We managed to [stick to the plan], do a lot of laps which is good for the engine and also for the car.
“I think we know we have some good potential, but we don’t know what the others are doing at the moment, so we’ll just try to improve in the areas where we feel we are struggling a bit at the moment.”
In addition to their own performance, Red Bull may have also taken heart from seeing Mercedes and Ferrari both lose vital running time through reliability concerns on Tuesday.
“I’m not really looking at them, but more looking at the number of laps we did, I think it’s been a really productive week last week and then to start the second week with that number of laps is clearly positive,” Gasly responded.
“At the end of the day, we just need to [keep working]. Melbourne is coming pretty fast, but we have still have three more days of testing [to learn] a bit more about our package.”
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The Red Bull stable graduate also maintains the team is still focused on building their new relationship with Honda, rather than comparisons with the other top teams.
“Hopefully we still have some [performance] left but I think we’re just trying to push slightly more every day,” he explained.
“Clearly the target of the team [is to compete with the leaders], but also, we need to stay objective on that. Honda is coming in as their first year as our engine manufacturer, so of course, things are not automatic yet.
“We need a bit of time to to get the structure and extract everything from this package but the first few days have been really positive and hopefully, we can keep going like this.”
