‘We had absolutely no chance’ – Gasly rues ‘painful’ Azerbaijan weekend for Alpine

Pierre Gasly conceded that the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was “painful” for the Alpine team, with the Frenchman stating that the squad had “absolutely no chance” after lacking pace throughout the weekend.

Having failed to score points since the Belgian Grand Prix back in July, Alpine again came away empty-handed in Baku. The Enstone-based outfit took a gamble by splitting strategies between Gasly and Franco Colapinto – starting the former on the hard compound and the latter on the soft – but the move ultimately did not move the pair forwards, leading to a P18 and P19 finish.

Reflecting on the race afterwards, a downbeat Gasly summed up the situation by admitting: “We’ve just got no pace here.”

In terms of the learnings that the team can take forward from the event – with one eye on preparing for 2026 – Gasly spoke of the importance of understanding why the A525 seemed to particularly struggle at the Baku City Circuit.

“The cars will be very different, I think,” the 29-year-old said. “I’m sure there’s stuff we can learn because obviously it hasn’t been good at all this weekend in terms of pace, and we’ve been slightly more competitive on other race tracks.

“This weekend we had absolutely no chance unfortunately, so there is fundamentally something on this track which we’re not doing quite well and it’s important to take the lessons from it.

“But, yeah, I must say it’s a bit painful. It’s painful for everyone, and I just think we’ve got to keep our head down and try to work together as a team and try to find a way to get better for next weekend.”

The Azerbaijan event was also tough for Colapinto, who was amongst those to crash in Saturday’s Qualifying session. After lining up in P16, the Argentinian’s afternoon was made more difficult when he was involved in a collision with Alex Albon, an incident that the Williams driver was handed a 10-second time penalty for.

“It was a tough day,” Colapinto conceded. “We didn’t really have any pace today and we just really struggled with the car, with the pace, and we need to keep working to get better.

“Of course I lost a lot of time with the contact with Alex, 12 seconds I think, and then a broken front wing that gave me a lot of understeer [and a] flat spot. So it was tough, but we just had no pace and we need to get better at that.”

The 22-year-old added that the team would “try to get better” for the next race, with the Singapore Grand Prix being the next round on the calendar on the weekend of October 3-5.