► Gasly to drive for Alpine F1 team in 2023
► Will team up with Esteban Ocon
► Alonso goes to Aston Martin
In a move that’ll surprise almost no one at all, Alpine has announced Pierre Gasly will partner Esteban Ocon in its F1 team from next year. At an event ahead of the 2022 F1 Japanese Grand Prix, Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi confirmed what most of the paddock was thinking, revealing the French team had bought Pierre Gasly out of his Red Bull and Alpha Tauri contract.
Details of Gasly’s new contract itself are still scarce right now, but expect a multiple year contract as the team looks to add more stability and speed to its highly ambitious outfit.
Replacing Alonso
The move sees Alpine replace experience for potential and raw talent, with the team picking Gasly over its other options for several reasons. ‘The idea was we need someone who is capable of extracting the performance,’ said Rossi. ‘The maximum of the performance of the car at the moment.’ And Gasly’s performance over the last few years provided several examples of that.
Of course, a double-world-champion leaves a serious space to fill, and Rossi says Gasly is not a like-for-like replacement for Alonso; instead the team is simply changing its focus. ‘I don’t think you’re going to replace [experience], he says of the Spaniard. ‘But it’s not like it’s Esteban cannot set up a car. And Pierre is very good at that too.’
Although there is no replacement for sheer experience, the Alpine team is confident it can retain much of the approach and tricks of Alonso, thanks in part to the transparent way the team has worked for the last few years. ‘We have engineers that are very senior that work with Fernando. They learned a lot over the past three years,’ says Rossi. ‘Even the people on Esteban’s side, because we share everything. So they learn from that too.
They listen to what settings it will change and they’re like, Okay, that does this. I’ll remember it.’