When Pierre Gasly first drove an Alpine Formula 1 car in the post-season Abu Dhabi test in 2022, he was delighted.
“I could not hope for a better first day with Alpine”, he enthused after revelling in driving a car that was both faster and more responsive than the AlphaTauri AT03 he’d only occasionally troubled the scorers with during that season.
The reality of life with Alpine hasn’t lived up to that encouraging start, one that moved Gasly to proclaim “there is potential to achieve fantastic results”.
However, he has achieved the key victory in a battle that was always set to have just one winner.
By shelling out significant cash to extract Gasly from his Red Bull contract to fill the gap left by the duel losses of Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri for 2023, Alpine set up a fascinating scenario. Given the existing troubled relationship between the pair, it seemed that only one of Gasly or incumbent Esteban Ocon would be kept on beyond the end of this year. So it has proved, with Ocon on his way to Haas and Gasly locked in for 2025 and beyond last month.
However, despite occasional flashpoints such as their collision in Australia last year and on the opening lap at Monaco this season, it’s generally been a battle that’s played out in a less incendiary way.
And Gasly has managed to make his case as much through how he works with the team behind the scenes as he has with his on-track performance.
He’s always been diligent behind the scenes. At times during his unsuccessful half-season with Red Bull Racing in 2019 he was felt by some in the team to be guilty of trying to change things too much, but the 28-year-old proved he’s learned from that experience with the approach he’s taken over the past 18 months at Alpine.
“It’s something that was quite natural,” says Gasly in response to The Race’s question about how he ensured the team got behind him and gave him a new deal.
“I'm a very driven person, I'm very focused on my work and trying to be very close to the people I work with. I’m very demanding of myself and the same with the people that I work with.
“I’ve got a fair experience in Formula 1 in different environments, working with different people, and this has helped in understanding the mentality, team spirit and how to approach it.
“The first phase was trying to observe the dynamics inside the team. It’s just trying to push my own limits on track and off the track, and back at the factory to push the team in that same direction.
“I don't feel I've done anything in particular because everything is quite natural to me. That’s my vision of working with the team. The confidence and the trust I have in the guys and they have in me just increased throughout the first season and this year.
“It's not been an easy time. Last year wasn't as good as we would have liked, but we still came out of it with three podiums as a team, and this year clearly is tougher on them and me.
“Personally, it is not nice to be performing the way we are, but at the same time I really see the efforts they're making and I’m very sure that with that type of mentality we are carrying at the moment, there'll be a turnaround and we'll be able to get the performance out of the team.”
Gasly did most of the heavy lifting in Alpine opting to stick with him for the long-term over Ocon last year. In the first half of the season, it was nip and tuck between the pair but on balance in the second half of the campaign Gasly was the more impressive driver.
It wasn’t by an overwhelming margin, but enough. And partly this was founded on pushing to make changes to the approach on his side of the garage that made a positive contribution to a team that evolved its ways of doing things after the August 2023 management shake-up.
In short, while at Red Bull he floundered and overdid it trying to keep pace with Max Verstappen to the point where the team insisted he stop diverging on set-ups, at Alpine Gasly played himself in and slowly asserted himself constructively.
“It came from both sides where the team was very good at giving me the freedom and the transparency that I need to build the trust initially,” says Gasly.
“It was about very open channels of communication on how they work, how I work, what they like, what I like, and trying to find a healthy place for everyone.
“They also know the way I am, I’m someone that likes information, I like to understand what we're doing on the car, which way we are doing things and why we're doing it that way.
“They've been good at being transparent and very honest and given me the freedom that I need.
“As a driver, I'm a person that needs my space. I have my personality. I need my space to perform at my best and on and off the track and they've been very good at providing this.”
In keeping with the turn of on-track performance in his favour, Gasly suggests that it was in the autumn of 2023 that he felt fully embedded in the team. That shone through in the way the battle with Ocon played out. While Gasly was hardly destroying his team-mate, he took the initiative.
“I would probably say from end of September last year, October, I really felt OK,” says Gasly. “This year we started in a better place than we were at the end of last year.
“We get to spend so much time together and the more you spend time with people, the more you know them. I find you're just more efficient with each other and have a better understanding.
“It's no secret why you see guys like Lewis [Hamilton] working so long with the same race engineer, because you build that trust and that communication process where no one's afraid of telling things how they are, whether it's good or bad.
“You know it’s productive and you know from which angle you need to bring it. It’s that efficiency that might not always bring extra every single day, but over a full season there are situations where it means you make the right choice. It means you make the right changes because they understand exactly what you need and that's where you find the last few hundredths of performance.”
Gasly showed his confidence in the firm foundation that he'd created when he spoke publicly about the efforts he had gone to in keeping the relationship with Ocon on an even keel in an interview with F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. It’s important to note that it was only his side of the story, but he referred to the need to “manage Esteban and manage the way we interact, take my distance”. That seemed to be a clear message to Alpine that he was the one more motivated to making the team work.
Come the start of this year, the talk in Alpine circles was that Gasly was indeed established as the favoured long-term option and that Ocon, who’d been with the team since 2020, was very likely to be replaced.
That impression was firmly established long before the Monaco collision that prompted Alpine and Ocon announcing they would indeed part company, with Ocon recently being confirmed as a 2025 Haas driver.
“I knew coming here with Esteban knowing the team, knowing the processes, knowing each one of them, it'll take time for me to build the position I'm in today,” said Gasly.
“It’s never easy, but as everything I believe that putting the right efforts in is the right way get to the result.
“There was a clear desire from the team to make it work and make that workspace as good as possible. We just merged together in the sweet spot.
“The team has been really good at this and we've been able to achieve a place where we're working extremely well.
“We’ve changed compared to when I arrived - a couple of things which we've put in place in terms of communication, in terms of processes.
“Initially, when I was in the simulator there are few things that are different where I'm able to be closer to the people and make them understand more what's good, what's bad. We have this conversation and exchange of information which is beneficial to all of us.”
This work was key for Gasly because based on on-track performance this year, the statistics largely favour Ocon. The picture has been muddied by Alpine’s many problems and at times there have been specification differences, but Ocon has had a slender edge in qualifying. Gasly has the advantage on points, six to five, but overall the picture is still of two drivers who are largely closely matched.
But what Gasly had to fall back on was the work done off-track that meant he convinced the team’s management that he was the one to bet the future on.
Whether that’s a good thing is another question. While Ocon seems delighted to be on his way to a Haas team that’s a little less wracked with politics, Gasly might be wondering if becoming the main man for the long-term at Alpine really is the prize he initially believed he was working towards.