“I have to say I’m very happy,” were the words of Pierre Gasly after a Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in which he finished eighth. However, his career was not the easiest in the world.
The AlphaTauri driver was one of the drivers affected by the safety car coming out, as he had just stopped in the pits. But that was not his biggest problem, because he had to deal with quite intense stomach pains in the final phase of the race.
“It was the most painful last 15 laps of my entire career,” Gasly said. “I don’t know what happened to my intestines, but I was dying in the car, screaming in pain. I’m happy the race is over and we were in eighth place. In the left corners, I felt like I was being stabbed in the stomach. No It was nice, it was just about surviving.”
After starting from ninth position, the Frenchman lost a place on the opening lap before losing to Lando Norris and later Lewis Hamilton. Eleventh, he had the misfortune to change tires just before the Safety Car caused by Nicholas Latifi’s accident, which took him down to 14th position.
However, Gasly did not give up and passed Nico Hulkenberg on the track, before taking advantage of pit stops by the three drivers who had started the race on hard tyres. After the retirements of Fernando Alonso and Daniel Ricciardo, he rose to eighth place.
“It was an eventful race. We didn’t have a very good start but we were still in the points. Then we made our pit stop just before the Safety Car so it was the worst moment, we were just unlucky, we couldn’t predict it.” .
“Of course we weren’t lucky on that, we went down to 14th position, but we managed to do our race and finish eighth. For me it was… I felt really sick in the car, the last few laps were horrible. So I’m very happy to finish eighth.
After two races of the 2022 season, the new hierarchy seems to be Ferrari and Red Bull at the helm and a middle zone led by Mercedes and Alpine, with Haas, Alfa Romeo and AlphaTauri lurking and waiting for any chance.
“There are quite a few differences between the teams at the front and us, the chasers. But I think we are going to win our battle. We know what we have to improve and there are positive aspects. From our side, we have to improve reliability and we are going to focus on that. for the next races. We will also try to look for a little more performance, we are not lacking much, but we have to manage to find two or three tenths to be more competitive”, he concluded.
