Pierre Gasly was left to rue another disappointing race as he finished a lapped seventh at Formula 1’s Austrian Grand Prix.
Gasly was left down in eighth on the grid after a mistake in Q3 but completed the opening lap right behind slow-starting Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen.
But while Verstappen went on to carve his way to the front of the pack, securing the win with a late move on Charles Leclerc, Gasly was left a distant seventh.
“I struggled with the traffic at the beginning and spent quite a lot of time there,” he said.
“It kinda was a snowball effect with the time we spent behind, the hotter everything gets and just struggled with that, struggled to get past Kimi [Raikkonen] and the cars around.
“After the pit stop, I pushed too hard and destroyed the front tyres after the first few laps.
“And after that, just struggled with blistering. It wasn’t the best management on my side, so it makes the afternoon quite tough.”
Gasly was upbeat with the improvements he was able to show through the early stages of the weekend but accepted he needs to avoid making errors.
“I think we’ve shown some more speed,” he said.
“Unfortunately that it was in free practice and you want to be fast on the Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
“But overall I think from FP1, FP2, also Q1 and Q2 there are improvements but for sure they are not as big as we want for sure.
“But there are a few things and we’ll keep pushing to get the results we should get and I’ll keep working to get the performance right.”
