Alpine’s Pierre Gasly isn’t jealous of McLaren’s impressive turnaround but on the contrary the Frenchman admires the remarkable work achieved by his team’s main rival.
Ahead of the 2023 season, Alpine’s game plan called for the Enstone squad to finish fourth in F1’s Constructors’ Championship and to reduce the performance gap between itself and the sport’s top-three.
But from the outset it struggled to fulfil those expectations, succumbing first to the unexpected superiority of Aston Martin and then to McLaren.
The Woking-based outfit had started the season on the back foot with an underdeveloped car.
But a three-stage upgrade programme initiated in Austria delivered a significant performance boost to its MCL60 and allowed the team to leave both Alpine and Aston Martin in its dust in the second part of the year.
With just two podiums to its credit, courtesy of Esteban Ocon in Monaco and of Gasly in Zandvoort, Alpine concluded its campaign sixth overall in the pecking order and 182 points behind McLaren.
The latter’s remarkable ascent stood as the standard against which all midfield teams were measured, and Gasly has only praise for team papaya.
"There's no jealousy or 'oh s**t, they've done a really good job'” acknowledged the Alpine charger.
"To me, it is 'they've done it, so it is possible to be doing that.' So fair play, admiration for the work they have done.
"It is possible to get out of the midfield because they have, so why not us? My dad used to say 'two arms, two legs, two hands and two feet, so possible'. Go for it."
Gasly admitted that Alpine’s shortfall in 2023 was rooted in a diversity of reasons. But he also contends that the French outfit made substantial progress throughout the year, even though it might not appear as such in relative terms.
"It is for a lot of different reasons,” he explained, addressing his team’s lack of results.
"There are things that we have improved... I was going through the list of when I joined the team - how many things I thought we needed to tackle, there was a huge list.
"I was going through it again: 'that's ticked, that's ticked', we have improved in many, many aspects but that really shows how much the other teams are also working and improving, which is frustrating because I think we are going in the right direction.
"But the others have probably done better with sudden steps.
“In the end, you can try to improve as much as you can but as long as you don't have the car to exploit that, that is it, you are stuck with the pace you have got.
"So the best thing that you can do is take the opportunities when they come. We have done that quite well as a team but we just need a car that is quicker initially and then when we exploit it on track, we will be sitting ready."
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