Gasly: It’s coming together, everything fine with Red Bull

Pierre Gasly has played down the pressure mounting on him at Red Bull and felt content with his qualifying performance at the German Grand Prix to secure a second row spot.

The French driver endured a nightmare Friday practice at Hockenheim when he crashed heavily in FP2 which forced an extensive rebuild to his RB15 overnight.

With Ferrari suffering a double disaster in qualifying with both Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc dropping out due to separate mechanical issues, Gasly grabbed fourth place despite seeing his best lap time deleted for exceeding track limits.

The Red Bull driver felt reaching the front row would have been possible with a clean lap but was happy to secure fourth given his tough Friday at Hockenheim.

“I think that the last lap was good. I think I had to do better because I lost time in Turn 8 compared to my previous lap but it was still a good lap,” Gasly said. “Good enough to put us within a tenth of P3 or P2.

“I think things are coming together which is good. It’s not perfect and I feel there is a margin to improve so we need to keep pushing to find these last few hundredths and tenths.”

Gasly has shrugged off suggestions of pressure mounting on him at Red Bull and feels he’s pushing to the limits of his RB15 package which always runs the risk of crashing.

“It wasn’t my first crash and I know it’s not going to be the last one,” he explained. “When you play with the limit sometimes you play a little bit too much and you have this kind of mistakes.

“Unfortunately it’s annoying when you miss some laps and also give more work to the mechanics and lose parts and stuff like this.

“Everything was fine. It’s racing and this happens to all the drivers so yeah it was pushing to the limits and unfortunately I went too far.

“I went to apologise to the guys and supported them for the work overnight.”