高山的计划帮助皮埃尔气体避免additional penalty points

Although no longer knocking on the door of a race ban, but still the driver closest to it, Alpine have tightened up their radio communications to assist Pierre Gasly.

The Frenchman joined Alpine with 10 penalty points to his name, two away from an automatic one-race ban, with that now falling to eight and with another two of his points scheduled to expire on July 10th.

But with three races between now and then, Canada, Austria and Silverstone, Alpine have laid out how they intend to help their driver.

One aspect of that being radio communications after Gasly was hit with two separate three-place grid drops for impeding rivals during qualifying at the previous race in Spain.

“So we met in between Spain and here with Pierre and his engineering team,” team boss Otmar Szafnauer revealed.

“We met for about an hour and a half to discuss communication strategy, how we communicate with him, the information that he needs, the timing of the information that he gets, what he does with that information – just so we can get a little bit better.”

Although Gasly qualified P4 at the Barcelona circuit, he lost places after his P7 start and brought his car home in 10th place.

His team-mate Esteban Ocon, having started seventh, finished P8.

“It was unfortunate,” Szafnauer said. “Had he actually started fourth and ran fourth instead of starting where he did and then being pushed wide and ended up 14th after lap one, it’s significantly different running 14th than running fourth.

“So we have to make sure that when we qualify that high, we can actually race there. And we will do some things differently and especially on Pierre’s side. Esteban is more used to his engineering team, because he’s been with us for a lot longer.”

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Unfortunately for Gasly his Canadian Grand Prix weekend did not get off to the best of starts with the Frenchman breaking down on his out-lap in Q1.

“As we always do, we run the spare steering wheels on both cars,” said Szafnauer. “And the reason we run them is to make sure that they’re functioning because the rest of the weekend, we don’t run them unless they’re needed as a spare.

“And lo and behold, we had an electronics issue within the steering wheel on Pierre’s car.

“Once we got it back and put the non-spare wheel on it, it was all OK. So we’ve got to understand what bit of electronics failed within the steering wheel.”

Back on track for FP2, he was 10th quickest, 0.759s off the P1 time.