Pierre Gasly has joked that he will have "nightmares" about the Formula 1 rear wing of Daniel Ricciardo after being stuck behind the McLaren driver in the Italian Grand Prix. In the opening laps at Monza, a DRS train formed behind Ricciardo, who was running in fourth, with the likes of Gasly, Lando Norris, Nyck De Vries and Zhou Guanyu all trapped behind the Australian. Gasly tried to trigger an undercut on Lap 19, but a slow AlphaTauri stop meant Ricciardo was able to pit a lap later, and still maintain position ahead of the 2020 Italian Grand Prix winner. Both Norris and Lewis Hamilton were able to run long at Monza, and were both able to pass Gasly, who finished in eighth place at Monza.
Gasly to have "nightmares"
It was just a fifth points scoring race for Gasly in 2022 as AlphaTauri have struggled, with the Frenchman bagging his best result since fifth in June's Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Speaking to media including RacingNews365.com after the race, Gasly joked that he would be having "nightmares" having spent a majority of the race behind the rear wing of the MCL36. "I'm really happy with P8 in the end, with Q3 [on Saturday] and we managed to make he good start and were fighting with a McLaren for most of the race," he said. "I'm not going to lie, I think I'm probably going to have nightmares of Daniel's rear wing over the next couple of days because I spent so, so, so much time behind him. "It was actually a race against myself because I was getting so mad inside the helmet. I was fuming. "I tried as hard as I could to put pressure for him to make a mistake. "[It] never happened, he did a really clean race on his side. "We tried and at least I know we gave it everything. We scored some good points which always feels good."
Slow pitstops and missing "sparks"
Gasly added that the he and the team would review the slow pitstop that cost him the chance of undercutting Ricciardo, but he also lamented the race ending under the Safety Car - ironically deployed as Ricciardo had conked out. "I'm not going to lie, on my side, if I purely look at it in a very selfish way, I was on used hard and Lando [the car ahead] was on new Softs. "I definitely had more to lose than gain, but then at the same time, I was thinking: 'I know if they restart it, knowing the guys ahead, knowing when you drive a Ferrari car on this racetrack, and you get one shot at winning the race here, I know there could be quite a lot of sparks into Turn 1, and maybe we could benefit from it.' "I was ready for both scenarios, but they decided not to restart - I don't know why. "There were a couple of guys unhappy last year [in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix], when they restarted for one more lap. This time there are a couple of guys unhappy [at] not restarting, so it always depends on which way you look at it."
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