"I knew it was a special one," Gasly reflects on his final qualifying lap
On the back of Alpine's best qualifying result of 2025, Pierre Gasly has revealed that while he struggled for grip all through the qualifying session, his last push lap turned out to be a special effort.
Having already shown impressive speed in the middle part of qualifying, Pierre Gasly claimed fifth place for Alpine. The Frenchman also beat championship leader Lando Norris, who will line up sixth on the grid tomorrow after having made a mistake at Turn 1 on his final push lap.
Alpine is yet to score any points in 2025, but Gasly's great qualifying result mean that he might be well in with a chance for securing his and the French outfit's first point in this season.
“That was a very good Qualifying and we definitely needed that. I’m very happy for the entire team with that result and performance. I must say, I was struggling a little bit at the start of the session.
"I was not feeling that comfortable in Q1 with low grip and a lot of sliding. We managed to unlock the potential from the tyres from Q2 onwards and really extracted more and more from them as the session went on. In the end, Q3, and that last lap, when I crossed the line, I knew it was a special one.
"Even so, to be fifth and so close to the top three and even pole position is a nice surprise. Great work all round by the whole team and now we must focus on tomorrow. We have some fast cars behind us, we will try to fight them, but we know our goal is to cross the line inside the points," Gasly noted.
His team-mate Jack Doohan shone during the early stages of Qualifying, running as high as fifth in Q1. However, he fractionally missed out on making it into the closing qualifying segment, but he will still line up 11th on the grid.
“I have mixed emotions after that session even if the majority of the evening was largely very positive. We will start tomorrow’s race in our best starting position of the year on my side. It was all coming together nicely throughout Q1 and most of Q2.
"I think I missed the window on tyre optimisation on the last run – a little too fast on my warm-up – over preparing them and we probably did not maximise the full potential on that last push lap. Still, plenty of positives there and things to understand for future. Tomorrow will be a long race, with high tyre degradation quite likely.
"Starting in eleventh means we are knocking on the door of the points so we will see what we can do on strategy and aim to convert today into a top ten finish in the race.”
