Gasly: Alonso more aggressive since confirming F1 exit

Pierre Gasly believes Fernando Alonso is racing ‘more aggressive’ since confirming his Formula 1 exit after clashing with the McLaren driver during the Italian Grand Prix.

Gasly and Alonso collided immediately after the safety car restart at Turn 1, with the Toro Rosso driver picking up heavy damage to the right-hand side of his STR13, which he says wrecked the downforce and performance of his car and effectively ended his charge for points in Monza.

The French driver says Alonso didn’t leave enough space in their battle for position at the first chicane which triggered their clash just one day after a similar incident between the two-time F1 world champion and Kevin Magnussen during qualifying which led to the Haas driver saying he’ll be happy to see Alonso leave the sport in a scathing assessment.

Gasly says Alonso’s move was overly aggressive and feels the McLaren driver has changed his approach after announcing he will leave the sport at the end of the season.

“I think his approach is a bit different because he knows he is not going to be in Formula 1 next year so it looks like he is behaving more aggressive than he was before,” Gasly said. “What he did was not fair and we know that if you are alongside you need to leave space for one car and today he didn’t.

“I know he doesn’t like us because we have the Honda engine but nevertheless when you race with drivers [you leave space]. We came to Turn 1 after the safety car side-by-side and I went on the outside and he pushed me completely out of the track.

“I tried to stay on track as much as I could but he didn’t leave me the space so I had to jump over the kerb and then he also touched me and completely damage the right side of my floor. From there on the car was completely broken and I was sliding everywhere.

Gasly says he will not raise the incident with FIA race director Charlie Whiting or at the next F1 drivers’ briefing but would speak to Alonso about the clash to clear the air.

The collision was one of a number of on-track flashpoints between numerous drivers, while Max Verstappen was the only driver to receive a penalty after bumping with Valtteri Bottas which saw the Red Bull driver demoted to fifth place.

Gasly feels a combination of ‘desperate’ and ‘too optimistic’ moves saw the high rate of clashes during the Monza race, having also endured contact with Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo during the Italian GP, but isn’t concerned of an ongoing problem developing.

“I don’t think people are desperate but people are trying a lot, sometimes I think it is probably too optimistic,” he said.

“I love racing and we are all racing drivers, we love it, but at some point some of the drivers want to overtake straight away or don’t want to lose time while some others want to resist too much so we see some incidents. I think particularly today there were quite a few.”