Pierre Gasly enjoyed one of his best Fridayﷺs as a Fo♎rmula 1 driver after ending both practice sessions at Imola inside the top five.

AlphaTauri showed an impressive turn of pace during Friday practice for the Emili🔜a Romagna Grand Prix.

Gasly finished thﷺird fastest overall in FP2, just a tenth shy of pacesetter Valtteri Bottas.

Reflecting on his day’s running at Imola, Gasly said: “I think it was one of our best Fridays, P5 this morning, P3 this afternoon, so close🦄 to the t🧔op guys, it has been a really good day for us, I felt really good in the car from the first lap I managed to push pretty hard, drive the way I want, and I think we are looking pretty good.”

Despite being so close to the Mercedes pair in both pract💯ice sessions, Gasly is keeping his eye on Ferrari, McLaren and Alpine, rather than the reigning worl𒉰d champions.

“I think we have got to stay quite cal🐽m and focus on our target. We know the Me💝rcedes have a lot faster car than we have and they have margin - they were on mediums, but I think we are focusing on ourselves, trying to understand how to improve our car, improve our pace compared to our main rivals which I guess is Ferrari, McLaren and maybe Alpine.

“So far I think it has been a good Friday but hopefully we can find a bit mor🍌e for tomorrow.”

After suffering a power unit-related i♔ssue in FP1, Yuki Tsunoda enjoyed a positive second session - ending the day seventh fastest.

“This session was a lot better than the FP1, which we had a little bit issue with the engi🧸ne so I just did four laps total, push laps, I couldn’t do much push lap in FP1 but it went well, engine was solved, and also I did race sim and quali sim.. performance run, so that was quite good,” Tsunoda added.

“I learn especially race management, like tyre management, I got quite a interesting data from the soft tyre race management so we’ll analyse that, and see what happens. I think for n🎶ow I’m just building up the pace, which I co๊uldn’t do in FP1, so hopefully, it will be better in FP3, but we’ll see.”