Yuki Tsunoda: It seemed to me that there was a problem with the car

The Zandvoort race was the eighth of the season in which AlphaTauri scored no points – Pierre Gasly finished eleventh and Yuki Tsunoda retired.

From the side, the Japanese driver’s departure seemed inexplicable – after the pit stop, Yuki stopped on the track and informed the engineer about the loose wheel, but after the team confirmed that there were no problems with the wheel, he continued to move around the potholes. . In the pit lane, the mechanics tried to fasten Tsunode’s seat belts after Yuki returned to the track, but after a few corners he stopped – this time for good.

In a post-finish press release, Tsunoda explained his maneuvers rather vaguely, limiting the team to the standard phrase about “investigating the reasons for retirement.”

Pierre Gasly (11th): “There’s nothing nice about finishing 11th – we tried our best to earn points, but I didn’t have the pace to achieve more. We lack speed compared to direct competitors – I lost time on the first part and then there were problems with the Medium tires in traffic.

However, I believe there are also positive results from the weekend – we knew we would have problems at this track, but today the pace on the hard tires was promising. The team travels to Monza for the last European race of the season. I hope we will be stronger there.”

Yuki Tsunoda (get off): “I’m disappointed. Before the race our pace looked promising, we were hoping to score points. At the beginning I lost a few positions, but slowly broke through to the top – we were positive and believed we were in could finish in the top ten.

Unfortunately it seemed to me that something was wrong with the car after I switched to Hard tires. The team saw nothing on the telemetry and called me to change tires. However, when I returned to the track after the pit stop, I continued to feel that there was a problem with the car – the team confirmed this on the radio and I had to get out.