After only six months at Red Bull starting the 2019 season, Pierre Gasly was demoted and joined Toro Rosso, the sister team, just six months after his arrival.
A real blow for the young Frenchman who was hoping to make it into the top 3, but this demotion finally had an electro-shock effect on the young driver, who seemed to shine for the rest of the season with Toro Rosso, including a podium finish at Interlagos.
“These six months have been enough time for me to question everything.” says the Frenchman.
“That’s the only answer I wanted to give, on the track, because there’s been a lot of criticism, and these are things that are challenging my career as a single-seater driver,
“I always finished in the top three positions in the lower categories, my first season with Toro Rosso had gone well, and these six months were enough to challenge everything.” laments Gasly.
“It affects everyone and it certainly hurts. I can turn this into positive energy.
“Everyone has obstacles to achieving the objectives and it is important to stay positive and always move forward, and that is the only thing I focused on, on myself,” said Pierre Gasly in an interview with RTL.
Pierre Gasly has set a clear goal to aim for in 2020 saying “I would like to return to Red Bull,”
“He developed so much in the second half of the season,” outspoken F1 critic Jacques Villeneuve told Sky Italia.
“We are facing a difficult season next year, but I have to demonstrate that I can perform consistently.” says the hopeful Gasly.
“The experiences I had in the past season should help me to do that. I certainly have not yet shown what I am capable of doing at Red Bull,”
I think the real reason was Honda wanted 2nd in the constructors championship and once they realized it wouldn’t happen with Gasly they and Red Bull decided to make the change for Albon and see what he could do. Red Bull were 44 points behind Ferrari after Hungary. it would have been interesting to see what Red Bull would have done if they were say only 20 points behind. I suspect Gasly would have stayed.
In the first half of 2019, Gasly was terrible. There were races where he couldn’t even fight against cars like McLaren, Renault, and even Toro Rosso. He didn’t seem comfortable overtaking them, and we saw Kvyat overtaking him in Toro Rosso. It was entirely understandable when Red Bull dropped him in favor of Albon.
Unfortunately for Gasly he struggled to recover from the two big accidents he had during winter testing. Placing him back into Torro Rosso was purely to build his confidence back up again. His results during the second half of the season proves that this was the correct thing to do. He’s obviously got talent and hopefully he’ll come back all the stronger for it.