Gasly's eighth in Montreal masks unresolved Alpine car mystery heading into Monaco

Pierre Gasly finished eighth at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, but the result flatters a deeper problem that has dogged the Frenchman since the opening practice session in Miami: a mysterious shift in his Alpine A526’s behaviour that has yet to be resolved.

Gasly was outqualified by team-mate Franco Colapinto across all four qualifying sessions at the Miami and Canadian sprint weekends — a stark reversal for a driver who had been one of the standout performers of the early 2026 season. The core complaint centres on low-speed traction, where Gasly says he has lost the confidence needed to push the car to its limit.

“It’s been the same thing since the first lap in practice in Miami,” Gasly said after Sunday’s race. “We see it on data, we’re pretty clear on what’s happening and we’ve just got to understand exactly where it comes from, and it’s going to be part of the work we’ll have to do ahead of Monaco.”

Alpine took Gasly’s car out of parc ferme after a difficult sprint qualifying — in which he could only manage 19th — to run through set-up changes and begin a systematic process of elimination. In the grand prix itself, Gasly ran an older-specification floor as part of that investigation.

A groundhog strike in Q1 during grand prix qualifying complicated matters further, leaving Gasly with damage that ended his session in Q2 while Colapinto progressed to Q3. The incident also meant Alpine did not pursue a potential grid penalty against Lewis Hamilton for impeding Gasly, as the team felt the damage was already the more significant factor.

The aerodynamic upgrades Alpine introduced in Miami appear to be functioning as intended on Colapinto’s side of the garage, where the Argentine has been visibly more competitive. The team has not ruled out that those same upgrades have inadvertently altered some characteristic of the car that Gasly is particularly sensitive to.

“We’ve made a few tweaks with our upgrades since Miami which make them work now, so I think we’re pretty happy with that,” Gasly said. “As a team, we’ve got a good understanding coming out of the weekend and we can exclude the parts, but they still will be important to analyse deeper and understand, once the car gets back at the factory, how to get that performance back.”

Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, with its stop-start rhythm and multiple chicanes feeding onto long straights, is considered one of the harder tracks for a driver struggling with low-speed traction — meaning the points finish may have obscured just how much ground Gasly is losing relative to his team-mate. Monaco, with its relentless sequence of slow corners, will be a far more demanding examination of whether Alpine can find a fix in time.