Pierre Gasly was frustrated to retire from the first race of the season after his Toro Rosso had run reliably in testing.
The team made a strong start to life with new engine supplier Honda in Barcelona, covering more laps than any team besides Mercedes and Ferrari. But Gasly’s car lasted just 13 laps in the season-opening race.
With new regulations limiting drivers to a maximum of three examples of some power unit parts, Gasly is already concerned about potentially taking penalties later in the season.
“I think the regulation is tough for everyone. Testing went so well with no issues at all, it was looking very good. [It’s] just a shame to face it now. I would rather have it [happen] at the last day of testing and come here with no issues.
“For sure it’s not going to be easy, it means probably at some point we’ll have penalties, but I don’t really want to think about it now I want to think about the next race and have a good race weekend.”
Gasly admitted the team wasn’t as competitive in Melbourne as testing suggested it might be, but he believes that could change in later races.
“I think we looked slightly better in testing than now,” he said. “But still the potential is there.”
“Haas is way too fast, we would like them to be a bit slower, Renault as well. We’re fighting with the Williams and Force India.
“[But] we have done only one race, let’s see because in these conditions at this track, that’s where we are. But maybe in hotter or cooler conditions will be different. We know our car is pretty good in the low speed so there will be tracks that suit our car a bit better. Wait and see the other races, but we have potential to fight.”
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2018 F1 season
- McLaren staff told us we were “totally crazy” to take Honda engines in 2018 – Tost
- ‘It doesn’t matter if we start last’: How Red Bull’s junior team aided Honda’s leap forward
- Honda’s jet division helped F1 engineers solve power unit problem
- McLaren Racing losses rise after Honda split
- Ricciardo: Baku “s***show” was Red Bull’s fault
Phylyp (@phylyp)
25th March 2018, 12:11
An engine failure? Do we know which component failed?
Oh, Honda, after you looked pretty decent in testing this happens…
atmarama
25th March 2018, 12:17
“It will be neverending” =)
anon
25th March 2018, 12:35
@phylyp, according to Honda, it was an MGU-H component failure.
UnitedKingdomRacing (@unitedkingdomracing)
25th March 2018, 12:53
@phylyp during testing there was no limit on engines though. I’ve read somewhere they used 6 engines in total per car just for the two tests.
Phylyp (@phylyp)
25th March 2018, 13:04
Cheers anon for the MGU-H point.
@unitedkingdomracing – So one way of spinning it is that they’ve done 2 seasons’ worth testing in just 2 weeks :-)
I recall reading about engine changes, but didn’t know the number was that high! Thank you for that. Looking back, we had 7 days of testing (as one day was snowed out), so that is roughly one engine per day.
I would have hoped that those changes were not due to failures (or risk of) but were trying out different engine configurations, but today’s DNF seems they haven’t cracked their reliability problems yet. They might be out of the spotlight with Toro Rosso, but come May when Red Bull (most likely) parts ways with Renault, I’m sure we’ll see the pressure ramping up on Honda. Aston Martin would appear to be coming in by 2021 at the earliest, so unless Honda comes good, Red Bull are looking at a few more bleak years. It’s no wonder that Ricciardo is holding out on his contract talks.
Gabriel (@rethla)
25th March 2018, 14:00
@phylyp Toro Rossos season is just a throw but by 2019 RB expects a competetive Honda engine. You can be sure the pressure on Honda is already full on but it wont provide any visible results short time since they are only testing now.
Sammy
25th March 2018, 14:43
Testing you say? I’ve heard that excuse for the past 3 years from Honda. Maybe they will get better, but by how much? Other engine makers aren’t waiting for them to catch up. They were well off the pace with the ONE engine that didn’t break.
As far as RBR expecting a competitive 2019 Honda engine, unless things change drastically by May 1st, Marko and company will have to decide if they want the Renault engine for 2019 as Renault has issued an ultimatum to RBR to make a decision.
Esploratore (@esploratore)
25th March 2018, 23:47
I would NEVER leave renault for honda after what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t take a gamble, renault is not able atm to compete with ferrari and mercedes (talking about engines ofc) but honda is too much of a risk until they prove themselves.
So if I were red bull I’d stick with renault and then check again in a few years, do they want to lose verstappen and ricciardo (although verstappen had a subpar race ofc)?
anon
25th March 2018, 21:07
@phylyp, to be honest, I strongly doubt that Aston Martin will be coming into F1 at all – frankly, Palmer’s comments in the press feel more like an effort by him to whip up interest in the company.
After all, Investindustrial, the major investor in Aston Martin, are pretty open about their plans to publicly list the company on the stock market – they’ve already appointed the investment bank Lazard to prepare the documentation for an IPO, and the IPO is expected to take place within the next six to nine months. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-aston-martin-m-a-exclusive/exclusive-aston-martin-owners-rev-up-for-2018-exit-with-lazard-hire-idUKKBN1E92MD
Furthermore, we know that Aston Martin are also planning on launching a new V12 Vanquish model later this year, with the formal launch expected to be in September – potentially around the same time as that IPO may occur. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/2018-aston-martin-vanquish-harder-and-faster-gt-due-september
Because there are two major events taking place for Aston Martin this year, Palmer’s comments smack more of a cheap way of keeping his company in the headlines ahead of those events, particularly the IPO (given they want to draw more investors in ahead of the launch of their SUV in 2019).
At best, based on Palmer’s comments in the past, any Aston Martin “engine” is far more likely to just be somebody else’s engine that they’ve paid to put their name on. They don’t have the resources for any sort of engine programme, and the last time that they tried to make their own engine for motorsport use was the 2.0 litre straight six that was fitted to the AMR-One – an engine that Dr Ullrich called one of the worst designed engines he’s ever seen in sportscar racing in modern times, and an engine that was so severely underpowered and hopelessly unreliable (car No.007 racked up just four laps, and No.009 just two laps, in the 2011 24 Hours of Le Mans before both cars had to be retired with engine failures) that it makes Honda’s problems in F1 look tame by comparison.
Phylyp (@phylyp)
26th March 2018, 18:03
Very nice points, anon.
socksolid (@socksolid)
25th March 2018, 16:28
In fairness there could be more reasons why honda used so many engines. One is to simply go through many engines so you can have one engine in the car while the other is being shipped to japan for analyzing. That can build up pretty quickly when you have one engine in japan, two engines in transit and one in the car. Then of course you need spares in the test site as well.
On the other hand what is an engine is a bit grey area. There are so many components (6) to what makes an engine. Number of engines is not a simple thing as you need to count how many of each components you are using and how many you can use.
IndianF1
25th March 2018, 12:33
Get used to it Pierre Gasly. Unfortunately with the Honda engines, grid penalties will hit you all the time
Robbie (@robbie)
25th March 2018, 14:57
Had to chuckle at ‘We know our car is pretty good in the low speed…’
That’s the problem. If they want to finish they have to go slow and even that is still no guarantee.
Esploratore (@esploratore)
25th March 2018, 23:43
@xiasitlo What do you say now about honda having a reliability problem early in the first race and the car being also in the bottom or towards the bottom performance wise, and mclaren fighting for 4th with renault and haas?
Ofc I’m not one of those who expected toro rosso to beat mclaren even if honda were good, but so far, in the actual race, looks like mclaren did the right choice to ditch honda, both in reliability (probably too soon to tell for that though) and performance (this was evident.
Julian (Mr. Sakura) (@xiasitlo)
26th March 2018, 2:28
@esploratore
Oh wow, didn’t expect you to ask me but well;
I’ll give you quite an TL:DR and an analytic view;
TL:DR: Gasly screwed up qualifying and therefore the race at this track, just look at Bottas, Hartley had a damaged floor the whole race, so results don’t tell whole story. Gasly would’ve been 13th in Q, right behind McLaren.
McLaren was 6th fastest team. 5th on race pace. They kind of lucked out with Sainz and Haas screwing up and Alonso getting the VSC free stop, the result was heavily inflated. So let’s wait a few races. Bahrain and China will reveal 90/100% of the pecking order. I’ll wait until then to start worrying. If they’re not good on power tracks, first half of the season is over. Notify me then again please.
I still believe STR will emerge as a kind of Force India in ’09.
Long answer;
The weekend was very poor, but not as poor as on paper. Gasly seems to be the better driver already since testing, and he was set on entering Q2 easily in qualifying before his lock-up, so being 13th/14h in Q2 and thus only being 1 place behind McLaren would’ve been much more assuring & realistic for STR. But seeing the potential in the delta eased me enough. The race was already tossed on Saturday though, Hartley had a puncture right at the VSC and damaged the floor so being lapped wasn’t on race pace, Gasly’s was set to be 12/14th on race pace. But after all the people only remember the numbers and Alonso is kind of a cult and this sport is mentally owned by the British, McLaren is British, So I’ll be patient and say kudos to McLaren these 2 weeks for winning the first battle.
McLaren optimized their weekend excellently. But on pure pace they’re 6th fastest. That’s in my most humble opinion quite disappointing, as they’re expecting they’ll gain on Haas, Renault, but the first is owned by an convinced criminal (Gene) and his evil strategist Gunther (this is not sarcastic) and the second is the team that even screws their last 4x WDC customer over until they themselves can beat Mercedes. Even if they gain from what Nando called ”free performance optimization”, they’ll at least probably not gain enough on Renault – knowing what Renault does with their customers – to actually overtake them consistently. So I’m keen McLaren will only fight around 9/10th place.
Let’s be honest here, they did great today. but overtaking is non-existent in Melbourne and the score was a little inflated with Bottas and Verstappen not being able to pass them and Haas getting spooked = they would’ve been 9th/10th (ALO) and 12/13th (VAN). So in points I’m not that worried STR can’t bridge that.
Very long answer, I know, I don’t care.
Esploratore (@esploratore)
26th March 2018, 6:57
Yes, this season looks interesting, mercedes seems to have like 2 tenths on ferrari in the race, who seems to have a little on red bull, after that there’s a huge gap evidenced by raikkonen pitting before haas and emerging still in front of them, think haas are like 7-8 tenths behind mercedes, mclaren around 9, renault around 1 sec, force india 1,5 sec, sauber 2,5 sec, this at least looking at the gaps in the end and the number of laps after gaps were neutralized.
The midfield is closer this time, so ricciardo, bottas and verstappen this time couldn’t just blast past the lesser cars like last year.
Mclaren indeed wasn’t as far ahead as it looked in the race but at least they looked quicker than renault in the race, in qualifying they were behind them, so I think during the season they’ll have to get a definite edge on renault and get past the haas, then the gap to red bull is too great, don’t expect more from them for this year.
Surely honda can try a lot of solutions on the car this year, since toro rosso is basically a test lab, they don’t really have the same demands as mclaren, so we’ll see if they improve the next races, but they’d have to improve a lot imo for red bull to switch engine deal.
Pinho
31st March 2018, 16:53
McLaren was lucky with that 5th place..saftey car gave Alo that 5th…Ver,Hul,Gro,Bot, are still stronger than the McLaren,making McLaren fighting for 9&10th place