There was no repeat of Pierre Gasly’s stunning victory at last year’s 2020 Italian Grand Prix. However, he scored a similar number of points as last season, mainly thanks to his consistently excellent qualifying performances.
Pierre Gasli |
|
|---|---|
| Beat teammates in qualifying | 19/20 |
| Beat teammates in the race | 13/16 |
| race ended | 19/22 |
| Spent laps ahead of teammate | 779/964 |
| Qualifying Margin | -0.53s |
| Points | 110 |
Gasly’s average qualifying position was better than that of Carlos Sainz Jnr or Daniel Ricciardo in their faster cars. His AlphaTauri was usually found in the third row, with occasional forays into the second. In Qatar he started from the front row for the first time, but there was luck involved: two other drivers received penalties for not slowing down at yellow flags, which Gasly had triggered by damaging his front wing on his final lap.
In fact, after accounting for penalties, Gasly had the fourth-best starting position of any driver on average throughout 2021. So is the resulting ninth place in the drivers’ standings a bit disappointing?
For the most part no, as an AlphaTauri would always struggle to outperform the McLarens and Ferraris throughout the year, let alone a Red Bull. And Gasly put in several excellent drives and can point to days when he made a bigger one deserved a reward.
A superb Baku ride put Gasly on the podiumGasly’s season started going really well in the early road races. He put in a big tempo boost to stop Lewis Hamilton from jumping in front of him in Monaco (although he also narrowly failed to contain Sebastian Vettel). In Azerbaijan, Gasly handled an engine problem brilliantly as he edged Charles Leclerc into third place.
Sixth on the grid for the next three races, Gasly added more points, except at the Styrian Grand Prix where he was defeated by Leclerc at the start. His luck also ran out at Silverstone, where he worked his way up into the points before suffering a puncture.
Midway through the season, Gasly was in great form. In Hungary he took fifth place and might have done even better if he hadn’t been severely delayed by a collision of several cars in the first corner. After finishing sixth in the non-race at Spa, Gasly put in a top performance at Zandvoort, starting and finishing fourth on a day where Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari all brought their cars home.
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A frustrating series of races followed. Gasly qualified well on the scene of his 2020 victory but suffered a front wing failure early in the sprint qualifying race, crashing heavily and retiring early in the Grand Prix with technical problems. Frustrated with his team’s qualifying tactics in Sochi, he missed the cut for Q3 when they decided against fitting a new set of intermediates and left the race with no points after reacting too late to the rain.
Further problems with the car saw him fail at the Circuit of the Americas, while two weeks earlier he received a questionable penalty for a collision with Fernando Alonso at the start in Turkey. Despite this, he recovered to sixth place. He improved to fourth place in Mexico with a superb drive, helped by his teammate who towed him in qualifying.
In the last five races, Gasly has only failed to score in Qatar, the scene of his front row start. The AT02 simply lacked pace in the race and crashed to 11th in the order. But he was quick at Jeddah – just two-thousandths slower than Sergio Perez in qualifying – and led the Ferraris home to sixth place. He finished fifth in the final but ended up behind his teammate, who also overtook him.
This was unheard of in a campaign in which Gasly had almost invariably bested the inexperienced Yuki Tsunoda. As it became widely known, the 110 points Gasly scored in his AlphaTauri AT-02 was more than enough to secure the team sixth place in the championship – one place higher than last year – without input from his teammate. However, it was also true that they might have beaten Alpine to fifth had it not been for a few missed chances on Gasly’s side.
These were mainly grouped around the inaugural races. From fifth on the Bahrain grid, he failed to score after colliding with Daniel Ricciardo in the early restart. Fifth on the grid at Imola became sixth in the race, but clearly more could have been done on a day when he had to make an extra pit stop after opting for wets over intermediates at the start. He took a point in Portugal by passing Sainz with tire problems but jeopardized his race in Spain by lining up incorrectly in his starting box and collecting a penalty.
However, these were minor blunders in an otherwise consistently impressive campaign in which Gasly continued to move beyond the dark days of his sacking from Red Bull in mid-2019 and continued to make the case for a return to a top team.
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What is your verdict on Pierre Gasly’s 2021 season? Which drivers do you think he did better or worse with? Share your opinion in the comments. Add your opinion about the other drivers in the comments.
Recap of the 2021 F1 season
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