Jonathan Eddolls admitted it was a difficult São Paulo Grand Prix for Scuderia AlphaTauri, with neither Pierre Gasly nor Yuki Tsunoda able to score points in Sunday’s main event at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace.
After starting tenth on the grid following Saturday’s Sprint race, Gasly was running inside the top ten early on but struggled with tyre degradation throughout the race. The Frenchman was switched to a three-stop strategy as a result, but he could not make it work and finishing outside the top ten before a five-second time penalty for speeding in the pit lane relegated him to fourteenth.
On the other side of the garage, Tsunoda had started from the pit lane after changes to his car overnight, but he still did not have the pace needed to be a top ten contender, and he was strangely not allowed to unlap himself during the safety car period due to a computer glitch from the FIA meaning he was a lap down on the field and unable to progress beyond seventeenth and last thereafter.
Eddolls, the Chief Race Engineer at AlphaTauri, says the team will regroup and look to fight back as they bid to beat the Haas F1 Team to eighth place in the Constructors’ Championship next weekend in Abu Dhabi, the gap being just two points ahead of the season finale.
“It was a difficult afternoon for the team,” admitted Eddolls. “Yuki struggled for the majority of the weekend to extract competitive lap times from the car, so we took the difficult decision to change the setup and start from the pitlane.
“Although the changes did give him a better feeling, it wasn’t enough to allow him to move forward and challenge for points. For reasons that we still need to clarify he couldn’t unlap himself, so not only was he a lap down but he got the blue flags from everyone and therefore this put pay to any chances he had to overtake some cars at the end, to finish only seventeenth.
“Pierre was holding his own at the start of the race, but with that pace our tyre degradation was high, and we had to convert to a three-stop strategy. Even with the extra stops, and fitting the new tyres, we didn’t have enough pace to get inside the top 10, although we crossed the line within 3.3 seconds of P10.
“The five second penalty for speeding in the pits dropped us further down, rounding off what has been one of the more challenging races of this season. In any case, we will regroup before Abu Dhabi, push hard and do all we can as a team to score points in the final race.”