Pierre Gasly finished 19th in the F1 Abu Dhabi GP, bringing an end to one of his toughest seasons at Alpine.
After missing FP1 as Paulo Aron drove his car, Gasly finished FP2 in P20 before improving to P17 in FP3. However, later, after being eliminated in Q1 of qualifying, Gasly was set to start the race in P19, with teammate Franco Colapinto behind in P20. Both Alpine drivers finished in the same positions.
A difficult race and season
Speaking after the F1 Abu Dhabi race in the print media pen, Gasly noted, “It’s the best night of the year. We’re done, yeah, very tough day I think, as the whole season was.”
Alpine finished last in the team’s standings with 22 points, all of which came from Gasly. Throughout the season, Gasly has had six points finishes, with a highest result of P6 at the British GP. But since the Belgian GP, Gasly’s only points finish has been a tenth-place finish at the F1 São Paulo GP.
He continued: “Looking back I’m still very happy and very proud of how the team managed to handle such a season, because when you don’t have a competitive car it’s very difficult and easy to give up. Nonetheless, despite the tough results inside the office, everyone stuck with it and gave their best. I’m still very proud of all the guys and all the people working in the team, and I’m looking forward to getting started for next season.”
“It felt very poor today”
Running outside the points, Gasly pushed hard, eventually picking up a five-second time penalty for track limits on Lap 47.
He briefly explained: “Once you put the visor down, you’re just looking at performance and trying to push everything out of the car. It felt very poor today. I’m sure there will be stuff to review and look at, but not too long next year is going to be very different,” he said, with the changing regulations in mind.
“I just remember the 10 Q3s and the 22 points we managed to score with that car. We’ll still do the overall review of the whole season and what we could have done better. There are still many things we could have done better, even on our part. We’ll move on from there.”
End of the Renault era
With the 2026 Formula 1 regulation changes, Alpine has decided to switch to the Mercedes engine after running on Renault power since 2021.
Having joined the BWT Alpine F1 Team in 2023, Gasly reflected on his time with Renault.
He said, “For sure, it’s been quite an emotional weekend for everyone in the garage. We did a farewell feature yesterday with all the guys. You see tears in their eyes. You just see how much it meant to all these guys.
“On my side, I thank the guys on the in-lap. It’s been a huge pleasure to work with all of them. Every single individual, whether it’s on the engineering side or the mechanics side, they definitely supported me a lot, rooted for me for all these three years. In the end, we managed to get a couple of podiums together. A huge thank you to all of them. I’m sure we’ll still see some of these faces in the paddock.”
