Pierre Gasly admitted his final FIA Formula 1 World Championship season with Scuderia AlphaTauri was not the season he was hoping or expecting, with the Frenchman scoring only six top ten finishes across the twenty-two races.
After two consecutive seasons finishing inside the top ten in the Drivers’ Championship, Gasly slipped to fourteenth in 2022, with his points tally dropping from one hundred and ten points in 2021 to just twenty-three.
With new aerodynamic regulations coming into force in 2022, AlphaTauri were one of the teams who struggled to get the best out of their car, with the AT03 being a struggle to drive throughout the season. And those struggles ensured Gasly endured a much tougher season than he was hoping for.
“From my side, what I can feel, it’s more the fact of working and trying to maximise a car which didn’t have the same potential as 2021,” said Gasly to Motorsport.com. “It’s not easy, also trying to keep the motivation in the engineering room, with the guys trying to keep the focus of everyone to minimise the mistakes.
“Because at the end, even if you do the same sport and the same season, the dynamic is quite different, especially last year was amazing for everyone, and we had the most successful year.
“There was quite a lot of expectations from this year, and it’s fair to say we’ve been quite far away from what we had expected or what we had wished for.”
Ahead of his 2023 move to the BWT Alpine F1 Team, Gasly felt his final year with AlphaTauri was probably his most difficult, and other teams were able to get more out of their package than they were, even when updates were brought to the car.
“In a way, probably yes, considering that I have more experience and I have experienced good and less good [times], more or less success with the team,” Gasly added.
“This year with the change of regulations, unfortunately we didn’t manage to capitalise on this opportunity. There were for sure some difficulties from it, but I think some other teams, in fairness, did a better job than we did.
“We didn’t really get our opportunities from this change.”