Pierre Gasly Calls Baku Weekend ‘Painful’ As Alpine Struggles Continue

• Pierre Gasly said Alpine had “absolutely no chance” in Azerbaijan and described the weekend as “painful” after finishing P18.
• Franco Colapinto also endured a tough race, colliding with Alex Albon and struggling with damage as Alpine came home empty-handed again.
• Both drivers stressed the need to “keep working” and learn from Baku’s challenges before heading to Singapore in October.

Pierre Gasly said the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was “painful” for Alpine, admitting the team had “absolutely no chance” after a lack of pace left them well off the points.

Alpine last scored at the Belgian Grand Prix in July and left Baku empty-handed once more. The team attempted a split-strategy approach, starting Gasly on the hard compound and Franco Colapinto on the softs, but the move failed to pay off as the pair ended up 18th and 19th.

“We’ve just got no pace here,” Gasly said after the race, summing up a difficult weekend.

Looking ahead, Gasly said Alpine must understand why the A525 struggled so badly at the Baku City Circuit as the team builds towards 2026. “The cars will be very different, I think,” the Frenchman said. “I’m sure there’s stuff we can learn because obviously it hasn’t been good at all this weekend in terms of pace, and we’ve been slightly more competitive on other race tracks. This weekend we had absolutely no chance unfortunately, so there is fundamentally something on this track which we’re not doing quite well and it’s important to take the lessons from it. But, yeah, I must say it’s a bit painful. It’s painful for everyone, and I just think we’ve got to keep our head down and try to work together as a team and try to find a way to get better for next weekend.”

For rookie Franco Colapinto, the race was no less challenging. The Argentinian crashed in qualifying and lined up P16, but his afternoon was further complicated when he collided with Alex Albon, an incident that saw the Williams driver handed a 10-second penalty.

“It was a tough day,” Colapinto said. “We didn’t really have any pace today and we just really struggled with the car, with the pace, and we need to keep working to get better. Of course I lost a lot of time with the contact with Alex, 12 seconds I think, and then a broken front wing that gave me a lot of understeer [and a] flat spot. So it was tough, but we just had no pace and we need to get better at that.”