Complicated day at AlphaTauri, especially with regards to Pierre Gasly. The Frenchman suffered a lot from understeer, even complaining on the radio to his engineer that he had "arms too short to turn the steering wheel". Despite this and various balance problems, Pierre placed eighth in the first free practice session, while he slipped to ninth in the afternoon, almost a second behind leader Lewis Hamilton. The Faenza team, based on the data collected in 2020, expected a more slippery track than the high-grip one on which the twenty drivers on the grid took to the track. Tonight there will be a lot of work to do to prepare the car for qualifying, without forgetting, however, the variable weather which promises another wet qualifying.
"Today I wasn't completely comfortable with the car, but we still ended the day in two very good positions, which is good, and I think we can do even better tomorrow – Gasly revealed at the end of the day – I wasn't very happy with the balance of the car, because I suffered a lot from understeer, we will have to work on this detail. I think it's a common problem for several drivers, we need to understand the reason and analyze the data to understand how to solve the problem, and hopefully we can improve in FP3".