Full GAS

Pic: Sky Sports F1

Pierre Gasly has had his highs and lows in the world of motorsport and in the last 18 months he has been through more than most. Pierre has turned the negatives he has faced into his drive to perform better and boy has this worked in his favour!

For those of you that don’t know, Pierre Gasly is a French racing driver who currently competes in F1 for Scuderia Alpha Tauri. He made his debut in F1 at the Malaysian GP in 2017 with Toro Rosso before being employed full time in F1 from 2018.

Gaslys motorsport career started when the young Frenchman entered karting in 2006. He worked his way up towards the international scene in 2009, where he finished as runner up in the CIK-FIA European Championship the following year. In 2011, Gasly made his debut in single-seater racing when he took part in the French F4 Championship where he finished third after a series of 7 wins. Gasly continued to move onto bigger projects such as Formula Renault Eurocup and Formula Renault 2.0 Northern European Cup. Then, in 2013, Gasly moved to join Tech 1 Racing where he took a series of 5 podiums and a few victories in Moscow and at the Hungaroring; Gasly clinched the title. The driver then moved to the Formula Renault 3.5 Series in 2014, here he was hired by Arden under the Red Bull Junior Team development program. He finished as runner up to Carlos Sainz Jr. Following on from this success, Gasly then moved to GP2 where he debuted at Monza in 2014 to replace Tom Dillmann. This then resulted in Gasly being chosen to participate in post-season testing with DAMS. He signed with the team the following year, however, he had a poor season. Gasly then switched to Prema Powerteam, a rookie company, alongside Antonio Giovinazzi in 2016 where he became the GP2 Series champion that season.

As mentioned before, Gasly signed with Toro Rosso full time in the 2018 F1 World Championship where he raced alongside Brendon Hartley. Gasly performed reasonably with some great points earned, especially his fourth place finish at the Bahrain GP. After an impressive year with the RBR second team, Red Bull offered Gasly a contract to drive with them for the 2019 season alongside Max Verstappen following the shock departure of Daniel Ricciardo to Renault. Gasly really seemed to struggle with the RB15 and was always off the pace compared to team mate Max. His best result in the RB15 was at the British GP where he scored a 4th place. It seemed to most of us that Gasly had lost confidence in himself and was letting scrutiny from fans as well as his employers get to him. Gaslys poor form had led to a lot of speculation around the fact he may be dropped from the Red Bull team; something which wouldn’t shock many of us considering their track record. Despite his recent slump in form, Christian Horner - the RBR team principle – claimed that it was the teams “intention” to retain Gasly until the end of the season even though he was 6th in the championship with 63 points compared to his team mates 181 points. Contrary to their word, RBR demoted Gasly back to their junior team Toro Rosso with Alex Albon taking his place. Upon the “shock” mid-season announcement, the RBR team said they would be using these 9 races to evaluate Albons performance in order to decide who would take the seat in 2020. Horner was recorded saying: Pierre really needs to take some time out during the break, reflect, and take the lessons into the second part of the year. We desperately need him realising more of the potential of the car”.

Gaslys first race back after being dropped from RBR was at the Belgian GP. Sadly, at this race a Formula 2 racing driver Anthoine Hubert was killed in an awful crash on the Saturday. Anthoine and Pierre were very close childhood friends who had grown up together on and off the track. This weekend was an overload of emotions for Pierre which must have been psychologically very difficult to come to terms with. The fact that Pierre was able to race well enough on the Sunday after losing one of his very best friends the day before at the same place as well as dealing with the pressure of being demoted just shows what a strong and determined individual he is.

Along with the help of his trainer Pyry Salmela, Pierre focussed even more so on his training and getting in the right headspace. This resulted in him having a fantastic end to the season with Toro Roso where he achieved 5 points finishes as well as a 2nd place podium in Brazil after he held off reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton. He finished the season in 7th place with 95 points.

In 2020, Gasly was retained by the team; now named Scuderia AlphaTauri. Gasly has had some great performances including at the unpredictable 2020 Italian GP where he won his first ever Formula One race of his career. Gasly is the first Frenchmen to win a GP in 24 years.

Everyone was so, so happy for Pierre to win the Italian GP, we can’t think of someone who deserved it more than him after the struggles he has been through over the last 18 months. We are sure that his good friend Anthoine would be very proud of the driver and man he is turning into.

We hope that Pierre’s career continues to flourish and this new found confidence sticks with him over the coming years.

We hope you enjoyed this blog and we will be back next week!

Chat soon,

Sach and Soph

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