Pierre Gasly enjoyed one of his best Fridays as a Formula 1 driver after ending both😼 practice sessions at I𒊎mola inside the top five.

AlphaTauri showed an impressive ♛turn of♒ pace during Friday practice for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

Gasly finished third fastest overall in FP2, just 🍒a tenth shy of pacesetter V♐altteri Bottas.

Reflecting on his day’s running at Imola, Gasly said: “I think it was one of our best Fridays, P5 this mornꦕing, P3 this afternoon, so close to the top 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 M♔ercedes pai𓃲r in both practice sessions, Gasly is keeping his eye on Ferrari, McLaren and Alpine, rather than the reigning world champions.

“I think we have got to stay quite calm and focus on our target. We know the Mercedes have a lot faster car than w𝓀e 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 more ౠfor tomorrow.”

After suffering a power unit-related🌼 issue in FP1, Yuki Tsunoda enjoyed a positive second session - ending the day seve🌄nth fastest.

“This session was a lot better than the FP1, which we had a little bit issue with the engine so I just did four laps total, push laps, I couldn’t do much push lap in FP1 but it went w🔯ell, 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 now I’m just building up the pace, wꦺhich I couldn’t do in FP1, so hopefully, it will be better in FP3, but we’ll see.”