The one change that could propel Pierre Gasly to the top of the F1 podium

You will doubtless have your own opinion as to the whys and wherefores, and the rights and wrongs, of that precipitate switcheroo. Suffice it for me to say that, like quite a few other talented drivers whose F1 careers have been buggered about with over the years by Christian Horner and Helmut Marko — Daniil Kvyat, obviously, who was fired once by Red Bull, once by Toro Rosso, and once by AlphaTauri, which has got to be a record, but also in various different ways Mark Webber, Daniel Ricciardo, Carlos Sainz, Alex Albon, Nyck de Vries, and Yuki Tsunoda — Gasly found himself out of favour perhaps too soon, and maybe without good enough reason.

Undoubtedly, he was outdriven by Verstappen in 2019 – but, although we already knew back then that Max was good, very good in fact, we were not necessarily aware that he would soon become one of the greatest drivers in the history of the sport. As such, being beaten by him, even soundly, as Gasly was, should with the benefit of hindsight be regarded as no disgrace. Indeed, Verstappen has serially vanquished his team-mates ever since. I wish Liam Lawson all the luck in the world this year. He will need it.

Moreover, after Gasly’s demotion back to Toro Rosso in mid-2019, it appeared that he soon began to relocate his mojo, and by season’s end he was driving very well, finishing the year with a fine second place at Interlagos. Moreover, that maiden F1 podium had been no fluke. He had qualified strongly — seventh, miles ahead of his team-mate, the temporarily reinstated Kvyat — and he had raced lustily, crossing the finish-line 0.062sec ahead of third-placed Hamilton, who was demoted to seventh after the race as a result of a five-second penalty arising from earlier contact with Albon.

Mojo well and truly relocated, in 2020 Gasly drove beautifully for the Red Bull B-team, now renamed AlphaTauri, scoring points 10 times and serially outperforming his team-mate Kvyat, thereby finally ending the latter’s stop-start F1 career. Better still, one of those 10 points finishes had been Gasly’s maiden F1 grand prix victory, at Monza, an emotional win that he dedicated to his great friend Anthoine Hubert, who had been killed in the Formula 2 race at Spa 12 months before.

It is worth our reminding ourselves what Marko said when, soon after that fine AlphaTauri victory at Monza in 2020, he was asked why he and Horner had demoted Gasly from the Red Bull A-team the year before.

“Pierre should take some of the blame,” Marko began. “When he came to Red Bull, he saw only one goal in front of him: Verstappen. If he’d accepted from the very beginning that Max was faster than him, and if he’d tried to gradually get closer to him, that would have been better. But instead he tried to change his style, he tried to reduce the gap in other ways, to change everything, to try to attack too fast and too hard, and that led to complete failure.

“But then his return [to Toro Rosso halfway through 2019] was amazing. Back at Toro Rosso he instantly became the same Pierre Gasly whom we’d originally recruited, nurtured, and promoted, and he’s continued that at AlphaTauri this year. So I think he learned a lot from those six months at Red Bull, and I believe he can achieve a lot in the future. At such moments, you understand how important driver psychology is.”

In 2024 he was better still. Despite the Alpine A524 being a bit of a sluggard in the first part of the season, when it was improved it was Gasly, not Ocon, who generally drove it more impressively. Furthermore, he cost Alpine absolutely nothing in terms of accident damage all year – and that kind of solidity is a seriously valuable attribute for an F1 driver in the budget cap era. As a result of all of the above, in the official F1 annual driver poll – ‘the top 10 drivers as chosen by the drivers’ – Gasly was ranked seventh, beaten only by Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Oscar Piastri, and Carlos Sainz, who all had vastly better cars at their disposal.

So… what can we expect from Gasly in 2025, and beyond? Well, let’s revisit Marko’s remarks about him from late 2020. There is a lot that we could unpack from those two paragraphs, but perhaps the last sentence is the most revealing of all: “At such moments, you understand how important driver psychology is.”

A senior F1 engineer who has worked with Gasly recently, but who has asked me not to name him in this column, tells me that Pierre “has always been likeable, has a good brain, cares about his role in the team and wants to play it well, is sometimes every bit as quick as the greats, but can be too easily distracted and therefore suffers from a surprising degree of inconsistency”. What should we make of that? Well, in order to succeed in F1, drivers have to mould themselves into desirable commodities whom teams will want to hire for a wide variety of reasons, including but not limited to their out-and-out pace. If you will allow me a diversionary analogy, I am reminded of a key metric that stock market investors call ‘beta’ (or β). A stock’s beta (β) is a measure of how volatile its returns are compared with the market. A stock with a beta (β) of 1.0 tends to move in line with the market. A stock with a beta (β) of greater than 1.0 tends to move in a more volatile way than the market. A stock with a beta (β) of 2.0 may be regarded by many investors as too volatile, and accordingly they may tend to shy away from it, even though it may occasionally perform very well. Perhaps Gasly has a beta (β) of about 1.5. If he could push his beta (β) down to closer to 1.0, making the vagaries of his form less volatile, he would become a truly excellent driver – and therefore a highly desirable, and singularly investible, prospect.

Could he do that? I believe he could. He is still only 28. He has the talent. He has the experience. He has the charm – a characteristic underrated by people who have never worked inside F1 teams, because, believe me, when F1 life gets tough, as it often does, the one thing that team personnel and indeed team sponsors do not want their drivers to be is charmless. All he lacks is the laser focus that the greats have in spades; and, to help him acquire that laser focus, he could benefit from the wise counsel and steadfast support of a very small number of experienced, intelligent, honest, fearless, and above all trustworthy professionals working together to optimise every aspect of his modus operandi and indeed modus vivendi, so that concentrating his agile mind on becoming the best version of himself becomes habit-forming for him.

Yes, he has a manager, Guillaume Le Goff, but he heads up a sizeable management agency, The Grid, which handles a large number of drivers racing in various series all over the world. Moreover, Le Goff is an ex-GP2 race engineer whose experience, in the context of a modern F1 driver’s diet of frequent race-engineering interactions within his team, at the factory as well as at the racetrack, may be akin to the proverbial coals to Newcastle. In addition to his affiliation to The Grid, Gasly needs something – or someone – more bespoke. Or, to put it another way, whether you like Marko or not, you have to concede that at 81 he has forgotten more about racing than most F1 insiders will ever know. So, although he can be as merciless as he can be benevolent, and he can therefore be difficult to warm to, when he bigs-up the importance of drivers’ psychological support systems – which he has, specifically, in the context of Gasly’s development – we should pay attention.

So, now, in early 2025, Gasly is at a career crossroads. If he can continue to drive very fast, yet more consistently, comprehensively outperforming while unselfishly supporting his new Alpine team-mate, the 21-year-old not-quite-rookie Jack Doohan, and if their car is occasionally good enough for the de facto team leader to deliver the podium finishes that will attract the attention of the sport’s most senior decision-makers, well, Gasly could be nicely set for a serious tilt at one of the more attractive vacancies that may arise when F1’s two eldest statesmen, Alonso and Hamilton, set the driver market alight by finally hanging up their helmets.

But if Gasly does not to that – if, for example, Doohan beats him too often, and too early, and if the Alpine is never quite good enough for eye-catching podium finishes to be a realistic possibility – well, Pierre could be set for a career that meanders on in the same mediocre team and eventually peters out some time after its best-before date. Kevin Magnussen’s F1 story is a recent example, despite his fine performances for Haas at the tail end of last year.

I do not know Pierre Gasly at all well, but I have had a few short chats with him over the years, and I have enjoyed them all. In the Miami paddock in 2022, when I was Aston Martin’s comms chief, by mistake he entered our paddock hospitality building instead of AlphaTauri’s, which was next-door to ours. Realising his mistake, he stopped abruptly, performed an about-turn, smiled broadly, then apologised to me, since I was the Aston Martin team member standing closest to him at the time.

“Well, not yet, Pierre,” I said, “but maybe, yes, maybe, you might one day join our team?”

He beamed luminously and replied, “Yes, why not?”

When Alonso finally calls it a day, it would be great to see Gasly, operating at a beta (β) of 1.0, winning races in a superfast Adrian Newey-designed Aston Martin-Honda. Let’s hope it happens. Indeed, let’s hope that Marko was right when he said of Gasly, nearly five years ago now, “I believe he can achieve a lot in the future.”