Alpine’s struggles with an overweight and undercooked car at the start of 2024 hurt Pierre Gasly but, when the A524 started to improve, the Frenchman shone.
A stretch of four points-scoring finishes from Monaco to Austria gave Alpine hope that it could reverse the arrears, but it was in a series of late-season improvements where Gasly’s year picked up.
He followed team-mate Esteban Ocon home in Brazil for an unexpected 2-3 finish, and continued to star: third on the grid in Las Vegas was wasted with an engine problem, but he rounded the year off with fifth and seventh in the last two races.
Why Gasly is so high - and it's not recency bias
When Autosport's top 10 drivers of F1's 2024 season were listed, there might have been a smidgen of a surprise that Pierre Gasly had outranked Lewis Hamilton and Nico Hulkenberg - with maybe a few 'recency bias' suggestions from those in the crowd.
How could a driver, who was near the back of the grid for most of the year until Alpine came good, outrank the winner of two races in 2024? Unthinkable, surely?
In reality, Gasly's had an excellent year - it just went under-rewarded in the opening two thirds of the year. Remember that Alpine had a car that was probably around 10kg overweight at the start of the year, and had plenty of downforce missing, to compound the 35-ish horsepower deficit in its Renault power unit to the other manufacturers. And, when a new low-weight, aero-boosting floor upgrade was fast-tracked for China, it was Esteban Ocon who received it - not Gasly.
The two were somewhat evenly matched in the opening few rounds, following their pattern in 2023: Ocon held a qualifying advantage, Gasly was better on Sundays. Even when Gasly got his own upgraded floor the two remained even but, in Monaco, the picture seemed to change with an apparent transfer of energy from Ocon to Gasly.
When Ocon tried to stuff his car past Gasly at Portier, presumably irritated that his team-mate had found a way ahead, he almost took out both Alpine cars in one fell swoop. Gasly survived the assault, Ocon did not; thankfully, a red flag allowed the team to ensure the sole survivor could get to the end. As such, Gasly claimed a point for his efforts, no thanks to his team-mate's efforts.
Alpine then scored points in the next three races, even if there were few indications (apart from qualifying seventh and eighth in Spain) that it had the pace to challenge the likes of RB, Haas, and Aston Martin for the final clutch of points.
Versus Ocon, Mexico was one of the clearest separations between them; Gasly hurled his car into Q3 and booked eighth on the grid. And, although Ocon was ahead in Brazil, Gasly was with him at the close of a wet and wild Interlagos race.
Yet, Gasly rates none of these as his best races of the near, nor any of his consistent points-scoring exploits at the end of the year - instead, he reckons his run to 12th in Baku was his best performance of the year.
"Absolutely no one noticed it and it was probably my best race of the year," he related. "That's Formula 1 and that's what can be frustrating at times is I finished that race, I don't think anyone could have done a better lap than I've done for 50 laps in a row there.
"I was pleased and I said, 'f***, I'm going back home with absolutely zero points, 30 seconds from the top 10.' It's pretty tough to find satisfaction in that. But, at the end of the day, I was always trying to come with the same approach and get the best of what you have."
