Overtaking in Monaco? Gasly and Vettel “almost finished at the port”

Vettel scored his first points of the season in Monaco. He did so with strategic intelligence, surpassing both Gasly and Lewis Hamilton. He took fifth place. When he came out of the pits, however, he found himself sitting next to Gasly at Beau Rivage, it was only at Massenet that Vettel was finally in the lead. Incidentally, the promotion was not visible to viewers. Gasly went on to tell his story about Vettel’s action.

“I spoke to him and also said he couldn’t have squeezed me an inch further,” Gasly said. “You know it’s not really a straight stretch when you go up. There are curves in it, I was hoping it would give some room, but I wasn’t sure until I got there. It was tight and tight, it was tough action, but fair. We both finished well. I think we would have ended up in port if I had been more aggressive. I’m glad we survived.

From Vettel’s perspective, it was also a bold move. He said, “I didn’t really see him, he was in the blind spot and then you can’t really see him properly. We went up and at one point you get some turns. I spoke to him and he didn’t know if I had seen him and left him some space. I gave it that space, but I also had to use the ideal row. I had new tires so it was just possible. I was just a little early and it finally made the difference.

Nonetheless, Gasly posted his best result of the season. With sixth place, AlphaTauri helped overtake Alpine in the constructors’ championship. “We had our best qualifying session of the season and it was our best race result of the year,” said Gasly. So I’m happy. It was pretty intense with Lewis Hamilton the whole race behind us, we couldn’t afford any mistakes. He stopped and put pressure on us and had to repel his attack. Vettel and Perez came because of the overcut. So we have to look at that, but overall I’m pretty happy with the step we took this weekend.