Not a battle with Red Bull, but with Haas: Alpine lick their wounds

It did not come as a huge surprise. Still, it hit Alpine hard. The French factory team had the worst car on the grid in Bahrain and the unpleasant news is: this does not seem to be changing. Meanwhile, Alpine have (again) implemented a reshuffle within the management team, in the short term this will not solve the problems.

Pierre Gasly - who left AlphaTauri a year ago, hoping to fight for podium spots with Alpine regularly - can look forward to battles with Haas and Stake F1 for now. "I think it was as we expected," he said after the race to GPblog and others, before listing the facts: "Qualified on the last row and finished at the back of the field."

Alpine had dramatic pit stops

If the car is not good then, it also does not help that the pit stops were very slow due to a problem with the equipment. "I lost about six, seven seconds on the first stop. I lost another three seconds on the second stop. So, it could have put me a couple of places up the road. But still, when you're 18, still too far away from the 10th position. In the scheme of the bigger picture, this is one area we've got to improve. I know we've got solutions, I think, coming up in the next few weeks.

Gasly asked for patience, even though he sees many glum faces around him. "I think about the talented 500 people that are behind me. No one's enjoying it. No one's doing racing to be P18 and 17. We all want to find solutions. We're all going to work as hard as we can. Time will tell. But it might be a good thing for us to find even more potential within our group and within our team."

"So, at the minute, we’re aware of the situation. We're aware of the limitation. Everyone wants to find solutions. I see the mentality is the right one inside the team. But you don't find solutions overnight on these cars. You need more than that. That's why we'll have to be patient."