“OH MY GOD! WE JUST WON THE RACE!”
Pierre Gasly screamed, thanked the team, and at one point seemed like he was about to break into tears. But instead of congratulations over the radio, what he heard were numbers. “Eighty-four!” the voice repeated insistently. “Fail eighty-four. You did eighty-two. Fail eighty-four now, please.”
The voice belonged to another Pierre, Pierre Hamelin – Gasly’s race engineer at AlphaTauri, trying to correct the only mistake his driver made that afternoon.
“It’s something that I feel a bit frustrated about,” laughs Hamelin as he tells GP Racing his side of the story of Gasly’s emotional in-lap at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza.
“Basically, on the in-lap we’ve got to do the switches, just for reliability. It’s really important. Until the car is switched off, you really have to stay on it. I called to do a switch, but in the heat of the moment he did another one, and the switch he did was quite bad for the car.
I really wanted to be happy and have a lot of nice messages to him. But it was a bit critical, because it could have potentially damaged a few pieces on the gearbox…”
But it
