“I think we started really well, P6, managed to hold onto that position early on, managed the tyres on the first stint,” Gasly said afterwards.
“Haas had two cars to play with and decided to go aggressive with one car, Magnussen, who was behind. And we reacted to it, which with hindsight wasn’t the right thing to do as from the moment we boxed, it just went backwards.
“We had a slow stop, ended up in the traffic, couldn’t switch on the hard tyres and were just way to slow with the hard [tyre] compared to the medium. It’s quite frustrating as we had big hopes after yesterday and just feel that today was not good enough. Overall, as a team we underperformed.”
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Alpine’s struggle with the hard compound tyre wasn’t unique, with a number of teams finding the C2 rubber harder to switch on – especially if their car was following in the dirty air of a rival.
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