AlphaTauri team boss Franz Tost was "close to tears" when Pierre Gasly told him he would be leaving to join Alpine next season, the Frenchman has revealed.
The move was confirmed in the early hours of Saturday morning. Gasly will form an all-French driver lineup with Esteban Ocon, while AlphaTauri have turned to Nyck de Vries to replace him after the Dutchman's impressive Formula 1 debut at the Italian Grand Prix.
After having the door closed on a second shot with Red Bull, Gasly is looking forward to a fresh start in a new environment at the Renault-backed team. "It's incredible, a very special moment in my career," he told the official F1 website.
"I'm closing a nine-year chapter with Red Bull and starting a very exciting one. I'm taking my [professional] life by myself and starting this new adventure with Alpine. It's exciting to do it with a French team and a special story with Alpine.
"I won my first European championship with [Renault] in 2013. It felt like the right thing to do at this time in my career. Seeing the evolution and development over the last few years, the team getting their first win [as Alpine] in Budapest [2021] and seeing the progress season after season, it feels right. It feels like the right step to match my ambitions and targets. I'm very excited about it.
"It was not a decision you take overnight. I have lived a lot of things with Red Bull but at his stage of my career, I need to look at my future and what the best chances to achieve my personal goals in F1 are – and I must say pretty quickly it was definitely clear to me that this was the right move for me."
Having spent almost a decade as part of the Red Bull setup, it will certainly be an emotional goodbye when Gasly leaves AlphaTauri. The tears almost began to fall immediately, he said, when veteran team chief Tost was told that the Frenchman would be moving on.
"They understood straight away the opportunity for me, and also my desire to start something new and my will to fight at the front of the grid – and I'm grateful for that," Gasly added. "Helmut [Marko] and Christian [Horner] understood that quickly. I had long conversations with Helmut.
"I was close to seeing tears in Franz's eyes when he got the news, as we have a very strong relationship – we've been working extremely well together. Something that was discussed with both parties, it was tougher for some than for some others, but at the end of the day, they all understood what an opportunity it was for me. And they worked around it to make it happen – and I'm thankful for that."
