Gasly: Red Bull steering wheel ‘main area’ to extract gains

Pierre Gasly feels he can extract more potential out of his Red Bull Formula 1 car once he has fully adapted to his new steering wheel.

The Frenchman ended the first day of the second pre-season test second in the timesheets as he posted Red Bull’s fastest lap of the winter so far on a 1m17.715s, falling a fraction short of Lando Norris’ benchmark time. 

Gasly, who has been promoted to the Red Bull senior team to replace Daniel Ricciardo after just a single full-season at Toro Rosso, says he is still adjusting to his new surroundings, including getting used to the steering wheel on his RB15. 

“I’m still getting used to it, but with my engineer, I’m getting more in the rhythm,” Gasly said. 

“The main thing at the minute is trying to use all the tools on the steering wheel. There is quite a lot of potential there. 

“In terms of tyres saving and that kind of thing, it can really effect the balance just by changing a couple of switches. 

“So it’s trying to make that become more natural. At some points, you want to do it yourself rather than your engineer, you want to suggest things. That’s kind of the main area at the moment.

“There are still some places I need to work on, but it’s getting more and more comfortable, especially the high-speed now. It’s more or less fine-tuning.”

Gasly said Red Bull’s programme had been a little bit “compromised” in the morning after encountering some niggling issues, though he recovered to log 136 laps in total while also testing some updates. 

“The day started off a little bit slow, we had a couple of things to fix with the car so we were a little bit compromised in the morning,” he explained. 

“But we made progress and quickly racked them up in the afternoon.”