Pierre Gasly cured a mystery handling problem on his car by switching to his team mate’s settings earlier in the year.
The Alpine driver said his A524 has handled better since he began using the same differential map settings as Esteban Ocon at the sixth round of the championship.“There’s definitely been a step,” Gasly told media including RaceFans in Miami. “We realised that at the start of the year, until Miami, we found out that there was a couple of things which weren’t right on my differential, and used the other side’s map and then the car felt a lot more together.
“This played quite a big part in terms of consistency on the following races in having, not the ideal balance, but having a lot more consistency from the car.”
Gasly said the team hadn’t been able to understand some of the problems he reported with his car earlier in the year.
“There were a couple of things that didn’t really make sense with the car balance I was getting,” he said. “So just asked to try the other side’s map and then we straight away found more performance.
“It’s one of these things where it was sort of like a coding problem, which unfortunately couldn’t be spotted. It was more like a software type of issue. Bus cost us sort of performance early on and now we’ve found a lot more consistency and at least we’re aligned on both sides here.”
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However Gasly admitted the team have more to do for him to be completely happy with his car’s balance. “At the minute, what we’re missing is the balance is not ideal everywhere,” he said. “On some tracks, like Barcelona, I was reasonably happy.
“We’re just lacking load in the high-speed which triggers a bit too much sliding and then obviously in the race, overheating the tyres and you pay the price on traction. The stability is not ideal, but it’s fine, it’s just the understeer in some places, which we’re trying to cure and then our traction is not ideal.
“When you put it that way, it’s not great, but obviously they are looking at fine details. What I like is we’ve got very clear ideas of what we’re missing. We have also good ideas on how to fix them.
“So I don’t think we’ll see everything this season, but we’ll see some evolution this season. And I’m quite confident that also for next year we’ve got a good plan and process to basically improve what we got.”
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Osnola
12th July 2024, 12:46
Interesting, one of the nain problems during his time next to max, was he tried to reinvent the car settings and failed.
It seems his learning aspect in this regard shows little progress.
HaL
12th July 2024, 15:13
The way I understand the article is that this was not a deliberate difference of settings. More like a software issue…. Maybe I’m wrong
Osnola
12th July 2024, 21:51
Possible, but still the driver steers the engineers with his input.
If he does not know whats wrong he fails in development tasks.
S
13th July 2024, 10:15
The driver tells the engineers what the car is doing and what they want it to do, and then the engineers and their computers translate that into setup changes.
F1 drivers haven’t been primarily responsible for their own car setup for many decades.
Frans
15th July 2024, 9:00
He probably know what was wrong in terms of actual car behavior, but the fix can be many thing. When he encountered handling problem, his side probably tweaking other things to try and make it better but didn’t touch the differential map. This is more of his side of the garage that failed him rather than Gasly himself. Driver is driver, they are not engineer. What they can do related to the setting is giving the engineer feedback about the ride quality, how it steers, how it brakes, how is the suspension feels, etc. The more precise the information the better.
H@nk
12th July 2024, 19:05
So basically Gasley still doesn’t know how to set up an F1 car on his own?
HAL
13th July 2024, 20:59
While the others have their own little tools and do all the setup by themselves :D
Pb
13th July 2024, 21:36
Yeah.
Gaslight set up the car wrong so the team told him to copy Ocons homework.
Pb
13th July 2024, 21:37
Not sure where the mystery bit is tho
Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
14th July 2024, 11:15
I love that he says “the other side” and not “Ocon”