Pierre Gasly has carried AlphaTauri on his back for two and a half years, but he simply has no way of repeating the feat in 2022. As fast and extremely talented as he still is, the Frenchman is suffering from a series of reliability and strategy problems. In such a tight 'F1 B', Gasly's biggest rival has been his own team
The Formula 1 2022 standings show Yuki Tsunoda with 11 points, while Pierre Gasly has only 6, but a quick look back explains how this is happening. Gasly has not lost speed, he has not unlearned, he is still a very good driver. It just so happens that the tide that mixes bad luck and incompetence from AlphaTauri has violently hit the Frenchman at the beginning of the season.
That is why, in a first analysis, it is fair to say that Pierre has stopped fighting with the Alpine duo, with the McLaren staff, and now starts to face his own team first of all. In seven races, he had breaks in three of them, besides the usual strategy problems, the most recent of them in Monaco qualifying, simply the most important grid setting of the year.
It is no exaggeration to say, for example, that Gasly could have scored in every race in 2022 were it not for AlphaTauri. The only exception would be the Emilia-Romagna GP, but there the bad luck factor kicked in: he was beaten by Guanyu Zhou in the Sprint Race and had to go from last to 12th. In a race where Tsunoda was seventh.
But let's look back at the rest of the Frenchman's campaign. In Bahrain, he was fighting for top-8 when his engine broke down, in the first reliability problem on the list. In Jeddah he was eighth, while in Australia he came ninth. After Zhou's crash in Imole, the tide turned and everything started to go wrong.
Then came the debuting Miami GP and Gasly broke down when, again, he was in the points zone before the stoppage window. In Spain, the breakdown came in free practice and the Frenchman ran with a broken car the whole time, stopping 13th. In the Monaco GP, he was close to the top 5 in all activities, but crashed in Q1 when he could not even open the last fast lap in time, in a primary miscalculation of the team after a red flag caused by Tsunoda himself.
It was after this that we could see a version of Pierre that was almost unknown until now, at least at AlphaTauri. It was a Gasly annoyed, upset, angry with everything that was happening. This was a guy who, after all, probably already knew that Red Bull was going to renew Sergio Pérez and, at the same time, saw the team he carried on his back for the last few years sinking on its own, winding up on its own legs.
"Extremely frustrated today. We were fast all weekend, it's very frustrating to throw this chance away. I'm not happy with today's strategy as a whole, but mainly because we left the pits so late in Q1 and then I couldn't open the last lap before the session ended. We need to rethink a lot of things, we had pace for top-6 and, in the end, we won't start anywhere near where we deserved to," commented the driver who, on Sunday, would have a great race, basically doing the only overtaking of the race and, even so, would end up out of the points due to very slow pit-stops.
And then, even though Tsunoda is having a pretty decent year, with so much going wrong for Gasly, AlphaTauri goes down. The goal of fighting at least for top-5 already seems to have gone to waste. First because the car is considerably worse than the ones from the last years, but a lot because of the festival of breaks and strategic errors. The Italians' fight, for now, is with Haas and Aston Martin, for the modest seventh position.
With a history of evolving very little during the championships, what is AlphaTauri's perspective on such a year? It doesn't seem wrong to say that it is keeping ahead of Haas, Aston Martin, and Williams and thinking about 2023, but where does Gasly stand in this story? Riding at this end of the grid is little, very little for the Frenchman's talent.
With Max Verstappen and Pérez renewed at Red Bull, Pierre is once again doomed to continue at AlphaTauri for 2023. It's either that or seek new paths, which really seems to be the best option at the moment. Helmut Marko, the Austrian's consultant, however, wants to keep the talent in the organization. But he knows he has nothing new to offer.
"Before Perez signed his contract, of course I spoke with Gasly," Marko said in an interview with German website Formel1. "We have to see what will happen after 2023. What is the alternative for him? I don't think at the moment there is an alternative that is significantly better than AlphaTauri," he added.
Marko is even right thinking officially, but McLaren itself already admits that it may tear up the contract and Daniel Ricciardo. Wouldn't going to Woking be better than waiting for a new chance at Red Bull that may never come? Probably, yes.
It's too early to project what will become of Gasly in 2023, but the Frenchman has never looked more out of the Red Bull group than in 2022. For the rest of the year, however, it already seems safe to say that the prospects are very low. It's time to keep doing what you do best and hope that the stars finally align again.