Formula 1 | Frenchman Pierre Gasly will drive for Alpine in 2023

(Suzuka) It’s the French Formula 1 team: Pierre Gasly will join Esteban Ocon in 2023 to form a duo of French drivers within Alpine, with the aim of helping the French team to find the heights in the world championship.

Normandy reunited! Leaving his AlphaTauri team and signing for “several years”, Pierre Gasly, a native of Rouen, will join Esteban Ocon, his former karting companion from Évreux, within Alpine, a brand founded in… Dieppe.

“The fact that it is a French team is of course emotionally very special,” underlines Gasly, 26 – like Ocon – who will replace the Spaniard Fernando Alonso, leaving for Aston Martin.

It is also the end of the story between Pierre Gasly and the Red Bull galaxy, which trained him and then brought him up to F1 in 2017, within the Toro Rosso satellite team (now AlphaTauri).

“A real chapter that is closing and a new adventure that is beginning,” says Gasly, before the Japanese GP this weekend, who will take his “own flight”.

win-win

AlphaTauri, compensated by Alpine, as Gasly was under contract until the end of 2023, will replace Gasly with 27-year-old Dutchman Nyck de Vries, Formula E champion in 2021.

Pierre Gasly, whose future at Red Bull was blocked by world champion Max Verstappen and his teammate Sergio Pérez, finds there an ideal way out.

Alpine also comes out of it stronger, after a difficult summer. Surprised by the departure of Alonso, the team had formalized his replacement by its reserve driver Oscar Piastri. But the 21-year-old Australian had other plans – he had already signed with McLaren for 2023.

“We come out on top, with the best driver available today,” said Laurent Rossi, CEO of Alpine, to AFP.

“Gasly is exactly what we need,” he continues. “He showed that he could win, score big points and at the same time he is very young”.

Inseparable trajectories

Alpine also picks up a second Grand Prix winner. A few months before Ocon (Hungary 2021), Gasly had become in 2020 in Italy the first French winner of a GP since Olivier Panis in 1996.

The two Norman drivers, 26, grew up together in karting, on the Anneville-Ambourville circuit, near Rouen.

“Esteban was there for my first laps, and twenty years later, we find ourselves in the same team in F1, coming more or less from the same hometown in Normandy, it’s incredible,” smiles Gasly.

Even if their relationship was then blurred, their trajectories are inseparable, from karting to Formula 1: spotted by F1 teams, Gasly joined the Red Bull sector, Ocon the Mercedes fold.

After Ocon in 2016 with the Manor team, Gasly joined F1 in 2017 with Toro Rosso. Both have exceeded 100 Grands Prix in 2022.

They have known victory. But also difficulties. For Gasly, it was the emotional lift in 2019. Promoted to the official Red Bull team, he has no time to convince that he is already demoted mid-season. Back to the AlphaTauri box.

Ocon, he is pushed in 2019 towards the exit by the arrival of the Canadian Lance Stroll, whose billionaire father had just bought Force India (became Racing Point then Aston Martin). Ocon then became a Mercedes reserve driver for a year, before signing with Renault in 2020.

Seeing them reunited, at least until 2024, could almost seem natural. However, their cohabitation will not be easy: even if they respect each other as athletes, they are no longer friends.

“Esteban has shown a pleasant maturity, assures Rossi. It wasn’t the most obvious choice for him given their background, […] but he took it very well and the two had the same reaction: ‘water has flowed under the bridge’”.

“We are both smart and mature enough to measure the responsibilities that it takes to represent a brand like Alpine and a group as big as Renault,” explains Gasly. “And we both have the same ambitions, to be in front”.

Alpine, currently 5^e stable, has set itself the goal of fighting for victories by 2024.