Alpine on the role they want new recruit Pierre Gasly to play at the team

Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi hopes that Pierre Gasly can be the “technical leader” that will help to elevate the team up the order.

After Fernando Alonso secured his move to Aston Martin and Oscar Piastri snubbed Alpine in favour of McLaren, the French outfit moved to secure the services of Gasly.

Alpine would strike a deal with Red Bull to release Gasly from his contract a year ahead of schedule, allowing him to depart their sister team AlphaTauri for this new challenge.

2022 was a strong campaign for Alpine as they finished at the head of the midfield in P4, though moving forward the team are not content with such a position, instead they have their sights set on making life more difficult for the top three of Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes.

And in order to get there, Rossi says they are going to need Gasly to play a major role by guiding the team down the right path.

“Hopefully he’s going to bring what we need, which is to continue developing the car,” said Rossi, as per Motorsport.com. “Because at the moment, we are still pretty much in the midfield and we need to take the car a notch up.

“For that, you need drivers that are not only capable only to go fast and score points with the potential the car gives us, but also to take it to the next level.

“That means that you need to, as of Friday [practice], to be able to give feedback to the team and take the whole team in the right direction so the car improves.

“这就是皮埃尔,我们希望,带来. I mean, he was the technical leader in many ways, I guess, at AlphaTauri. We want him to continue doing that, grow the team, grow himself with us and take us to a new level.”

AlphaTauri prepared Pierre Gasly for such a role

While historically Red Bull’s second team has been all about developing talent for the main team, in recent years those lines have become a little more blurred, a large part of that due to the relative barren spell which the highly-successfulRed Bull Junior Teamhas been experiencing.

Gasly then in recent years was very much serving as AlphaTauri’s experienced lead driver, alongside Yuki Tsunoda who was getting his first couple of Formula 1 seasons under his belt.

And so now as he moves to Alpine, Gasly has plenty of knowledge to take with him when it comes to steering his team in the right direction, though he will look to move on from the slight asterisk that was 2022, with AlphaTauri finishing P9 in the final standings, and falling well below his and Red Bull’s expectations.

But, with a combination of Gasly and Esteban Ocon which boasts youth and experience in tandem, Alpine have every right to be excited about this partnership.

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