Pierre Gasly (Alpine): Missed out on the podium, took pole, finished seventh

It’s been an emotional few days for Pierre Gasly. The surprise pole-sitter from Saturday’s Monza session finished seventh in Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix. At the Monza Grand Prix, near his adopted home of Milan, the Alpine driver ended up further down the order than he had hoped – and was left with mixed feelings.

Gasly said after the race: “The realistic part of me is very satisfied. When you start from pole position, there’s naturally also a part of you that thinks: ‘OK, anything can happen over 54 laps – this and that.’ But I have to be honest: before the race, we knew it would be extremely difficult to maintain the pace during the race and keep up with the front-runners.”

There were plenty of positives from the Monza weekend

So, all in all, a positive outcome: “I’m very happy with both starts. We had two brilliant starts; we managed to hold the lead in the first one, and the second one went really well too. There were a few battles; we stayed in the mix for the first ten laps and had a duel with Lando (Norris, ed.), who’s won the last two races. From our point of view, that’s very positive, and we finished three seconds behind Lewis (Hamilton), who’s fighting for podium places this year – so I’m by no means dissatisfied with that. Of course, the final result is 7th place, and you wish you could have got a bit more out of it. But I think, overall, we simply have to take all the positives from the weekend with us, because there were plenty of them.”

Monaco ruling against Gasly

For Gasly, the Monza weekend was a rollercoaster of emotions: on Friday, he lost his Monaco podium following a court ruling. On Saturday, he secured pole position. Then on Sunday came the race, with two commanding starts, but ultimately only seventh place.

Exciting 24 hours

Gasly on these crazy few days: “That’s a bit like the story of my life. A lot has happened. The last 24 hours have certainly been extremely exciting and great fun – with all the energy, the motivation in the pits and the reaction of the whole team. I’m sure this will give us all a massive boost. When I look at where we were last year and where we are today. The cars ahead of us were only just ahead, but we were 18 seconds ahead of Lindblad. The gap to the cars in front of us was smaller than the gap to the cars behind us. We need to build on that and hopefully we can repeat it.”

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Gasly has a special memento from this memorable weekend: a pole position ring, which every pole-setter at Monza now receives, made to measure. Measurements were taken on Saturday. Gasly: “That’s cool. They should do that more often, especially when I take pole position,” he said with a laugh. It was his first pole. Gasly: “Apparently, this is one of those initiatives they’ve been organising at Monza for the past three years. It’s a bit like in the NBA. 18-carat gold and a few diamonds and so on. I’ll put it in the display cabinet – it’ll look great there.”