Pierre Gasly

Pierre Gasly's F1 career has been a genuine rollercoaster, the kind of story that makes more sense told backwards than forwards. Growing up in Rouen, France, he came up through karting and the French junior single-seater scene before joining Red Bull's junior programme, winning the GP2 championship in 2016 in the same era that saw several of his generation's biggest names pass through that same feeder series. Red Bull fast-tracked him into Formula 1 with Toro Rosso, and he did enough there to earn a shock mid-season promotion to the senior Red Bull team in 2019 — a huge opportunity that turned into one of the more painful chapters of his career.

Partnered with Max Verstappen at a stage when Verstappen was already establishing himself as one of the sport's most ferocious talents, Gasly struggled to match the pace and was dropped back to Toro Rosso before that same season had even finished — a demotion that would have ended plenty of careers there and then. Instead, Gasly used it as fuel. Back at what became AlphaTauri, freed from the direct comparison to Verstappen, he rebuilt his confidence and delivered one of the most memorable wins of the era at Monza in 2020, an emotional victory that felt as much like vindication as celebration.

The years that followed cemented him as one of the most consistently underrated drivers on the grid — someone who regularly out-performed his machinery, picked up podiums that had no business coming from a midfield car, and built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful, articulate voices in the paddock, including serious advocacy work around driver safety following the tragic loss of his close friend Anthoine Hubert in a Formula 2 race.

A move to Alpine in 2023 represented Gasly finally landing at a bigger team on his own terms, rather than as Red Bull's junior prospect. It's been a mixed experience — Alpine has had its own competitiveness struggles — but Gasly has continued doing what he's always done: extracting more from the car than seems reasonable, keeping the team's spirits up through difficult stretches, and remaining one of the more popular, respected figures in the current grid among both fans and fellow drivers.

What makes Gasly's story compelling isn't a single trophy or turning point — it's the resilience. Very few drivers get dropped from a top team mid-season and come back stronger rather than fading into the midfield permanently. He's done exactly that, more than once, and remains, well over a decade into his F1 journey, a driver who still looks like he's got more to give.