Alpine offer update after Gasly's Free Practice 2 crash ahead of Belgian Grand Prix

Alpine has given an update after Pierre Gasly's crash in Free Practice 2 ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix which brought out the red flag.

The Frenchman walked away from an accident with just over 15 minutes remaining in the second session at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit on Friday, after running wide on the exit of the left-hand Turn 13.

Gasly appeared to lose the back end before skating through the gravel and making heavy contact with the barrier, which ripped the rear wing off his Alpine and caused extensive damage elsewhere.

"Overall, [it's] been a good day of testing," said Gasly afterward. "A lot of different parts tried across both cars, so now we just need to weigh what is good, what is the better of all these settings, and try to put it all together for tomorrow.

"Just need to work on understanding what happened in FP2. Had a big snap [and] lost the car... it took a lot longer to recover and by the time I recovered, I was already off the track and I could not get it back.

"Not the end of the day we wanted, but for sure the guys are going to get it back together tomorrow and then we will focus on trying to get to the top 10."

Alpine's Managing Director Steve Nielsen admitted that the team had planned to make big changes to Gasly's A526 before Saturday, having focused on aero performance during the opening session before looking at outright lap time in FP2.

"Pierre is fine, the car is not fine," explained Nielsen. "We were changing the PU on that car tonight anyway, so while it's quite a long jobs list for the mechanics, half of it we were already doing. No problem to be ready for tomorrow.

"This morning was never about lap time for us, it was always about accumulating data. And then this afternoon we looked a bit more at lap time.

"Pierre did set a reasonably competitive time but it was deleted for track limits at Turn 4 which is a shame. But the car seems to have a little bit of pace here, more so than the last couple of races. We just need to make sure we carry that through tomorrow."