Pierre Gasly has revealed how replicating Alpine Formula 1 team-mate Esteban Ocon’s settings helped resolve earlier issues that he experienced with his car balance.
Gasly appeared to have seized the upper hand over his compatriot during their maiden season together last term as he wound up with a narrow four-point advantage.
However, Ocon commenced the current campaign extracting more from Alpine’s uncompetitive A524 charger and out-raced Gasly through the opening seven rounds.
But Gasly has recovered since as a 10th-place finish in Monaco kickstarted a run that saw him score in four consecutive races to sit above Ocon in the championship.
The Frenchman has divulged that his recent uptick in competitiveness has derived from using Ocon’s differential settings to cure the balance limitations he’d endured.
“There’s definitely been a step,” Gasly said at Silverstone last weekend.
“We realised that at the start of the year, until Miami, we found out that there was a couple of things which weren’t right on my differential.
“And used the other side’s map and then the car felt a lot more together.
“This played quite a big part in terms of consistency on the following races in having, not the ideal balance, but having a lot more consistency from the car.”
Expanding more on the hitch that hampered him in the earlier rounds, Gasly has explained how the problem being embedded made it more complicated to diagnose.
“There were a couple of things that didn’t really make sense with the car balance I was getting,” he added.
“So just asked to try the other side’s map and then we straight away found more performance.
“It’s one of these things where it was sort of like a coding problem, which unfortunately couldn’t be spotted. It was more like a software type of issue.
“But cost us sort of performance early on and now we’ve found a lot more consistency and at least we’re aligned on both sides here.”
But despite Alpine’s progression over recent months, Gasly has claimed there remain several areas the Enstone-based squad has to address with its A524 challenger.
“At the minute, what we’re missing is the balance is not ideal everywhere,” he assessed. “On some tracks, like Barcelona, I was reasonably happy.
“We’re just lacking load in the high-speed which triggers a bit too much sliding and then obviously in the race, overheating the tyres and you pay the price on traction.
“The stability is not ideal, but it’s fine, it’s just the understeer in some places, which we’re trying to cure and then our traction is not ideal.
“When you put it that way, it’s not great, but obviously they are looking at fine details.
However, Gasly, who has renewed his contract with the team, is confident that Alpine understands where it can make improvements with the updates in the pipeline.
“What I like is we’ve got very clear ideas of what we’re missing,” he continued. “We have also good ideas on how to fix them.
“So I don’t think we’ll see everything this season, but we’ll see some evolution this season.
“And I’m quite confident that also for next year we’ve got a good plan and process to basically improve what we got.”
