Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Pierre Gasly brought out the second red flag in Belgian Grand Prix FP2 with a heavy crash at the exit of Les Fagnes, turning an encouraging Friday for Alpine into an overnight repair job at Spa-Francorchamps.
With just over 14 minutes remaining, Gasly was on a flying lap when the rear of his Alpine snapped on corner exit. He clipped the barrier, spun, then hit the wall again, leaving the car with major rear-end damage. Gasly initially tried to continue but could not return to the pits and stopped on track.
“Firstly, I am glad I am okay after the incident in Free Practice 2,” Gasly said. “It was obviously a fairly big impact with the wall after the car snapped and I could not recover it fully.” He said the team needed to understand what happened after “a big snap” because “it took a lot longer to recover and by the time I recovered, I was already off the track and I could not get it back.”
Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen said the accident came from a small error that Spa punished heavily. “I think he had a small snap, I think it was Turn 14, which unfortunately put him on the kerb, which then put him into the barrier,” Nielsen said. “A small mistake, which on a lot of other tracks would have been fine, but on this track you get punished for it in certain places.”
The stoppage badly cut into an already disrupted session. FP2 had earlier been red-flagged after Max Verstappen ran wide at Stavelot and dragged gravel onto the track, forcing a brief cleanup. Gasly’s crash then caused a 12-minute delay, and when running resumed there were only around two minutes left, enough only for practice starts.
That left Alpine trying to recover from a crash that interrupted one of its more competitive Fridays of recent races. Franco Colapinto finished seventh in FP2 and was 0.147s quicker than the second-fastest midfield car, Arvid Lindblad’s Racing Bulls.
Colapinto said Alpine had found “a little bit of performance this weekend” and added that “it is positive to be in front of the Racing Bulls, it’s been a long time we're not in front of them, so it's been a positive day.”
Gasly said the crash was “not the end of the day we wanted,” but backed the team to respond in time for qualifying. Nielsen was equally direct about the scale of the task, saying, “Pierre is fine, the car is not fine,” while insisting Alpine had “no problem to be ready for tomorrow” because some overnight work, including a planned power-unit change, was already scheduled as the team tries to convert Friday’s pace into a top-10 qualifying result.