AUSTIN — The Four Seasons in downtown Austin, Texas is the kind of place one visits if they want to be seen. The line up to the valet parking stand is filled with luxury vehicles, with people dressed to the nines either getting out of them to check into the hotel or make their way to the lobby bar, or getting into them for a night on the town. It is the kind of hotel where the lobby vending machine dispenses bottles of Moët & Chandon, and if you are a sportswriter who just got off a flight and is still wearing jeans and a hoodie, you might get asked a few times by the friendly staff just what, exactly, you are doing there.
However, on this Wednesday afternoon, this particular sportswriter had a solid answer:
I was there to ask a Formula 1 driver about his dog.
The driver in question? Pierre Gasly of Alpine, and a former Grand Prix winner. The dog in question? The adorable Simba, who along with other F1 pups like Leo (Leclerc) and Roscoe (Hamilton) has captivated the fan base. So much so that when I put out the clarion call for questions ahead of my time with Gasly, Simba was a popular topic.
As our conversation began, the incredibly friendly Gasly was willing to humor me.
“Well, Simba is growing slowly into a very naughty, naughty little toy poodle. But no, yeah, he’s amazing,” began Gasly. “He’s six months old now. Three kilograms. I don’t understand how he’s not like 15 kg with everything he eats, but I’m a foodie myself. So it just makes it quite funny. And he is a very cute, cute little puppy.
“So loving.”
Eventually, with talk of dogs subsiding, we did turn the conversation to racing.
Alpine’s slow start to the 2024 season
The 2024 Fomula 1 season was a slow start for Gasly and Alpine, and the driver was candidly honest in his assessment.
“It’s been very tough. You know, on one hand, we knew it was going to be a very difficult start already back then in January, we knew the car wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” began Gasly. “And yeah, it was just kind of a flop in Bahrain when we qualified both guys on the last row.”
As Gasly outlined, the focus for Alpine after that difficult start was on the in-season development of the A524, the team’s challenger for the 2024 F1 campaign. That was a deliberate process, which finally saw the team breakthrough with their first points of the season at the Miami Grand Prix in May.
“So from [Bahrain] on, we knew it was going to be a long year, that we’ll have to develop and find a lot of performance.”
Gasly also pointed to what he considered to be a very competitive midfield, which has made the fight for points even tougher for the majority of teams, including Alpine.
“And to be fair, I do feel like the midfield this year has been more competitive than ever. You know, it’s extremely tight between the fifth-fastest car until the last one. So it’s been difficult, but [we] just try to keep all the team motivated, more looking at the bigger picture,” continued Gasly. “And, you know, at the end of the day, every finding we have will be useful information for the future, whether it’s this season or next season.”
The team has also undergone organizational changes, including installing Oliver Oakes as the new Team Principal mid-season.
“So, yeah, there’s been also a bit of reorganization within the team. So quite a lot of things to deal with, but ultimately, it’s been frustrating,” Gasly said, “We managed to get a couple of points on some races, but it hasn’t been a successful season from our side.”
Still, the driver is very optimistic about what lies ahead for him, and for Alpine.
“And on the other end, even though all of that has happened, I definitely believe we kind of built strong foundations for next year. There have been a lot of positive changes back at the factory, and reorganization within different departments,” described Gasly. “We managed to get very good people [with] insights and experience from other teams as well. So I do feel we have a lot of good engineers and good technical staff, which definitely will allow us to make a good step next year.”
I then asked Gasly about his confidence level heading into 2025 and beyond, and the driver outlined how in his mind, the team’s 2025 challenger will be a bit “step up” from the A524.
“I’m very confident,” began Gasly. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m confident that next year is definitely going to be a good step up compared to this year’s car. We are changing quite a lot compared to what we have at the minute.
“And the good thing is we know what went wrong on this car. We know what we want to change it with to find performance from it,” continued Gasly. “And that’s why I think we’ll be in a much better spot or be able to fight for much better positions next year. Whether it’s going to be enough to say we’ll be fighting top five or consistently top ten, I don’t know, we’ll have to find out at the start of the year because you know what you do, but you never know what others do on their side.”
Gasly also believes that big things could be in store not just for Alpine, but for other teams on the grid, come 2026. That season will see F1 usher in a new host of regulations, and that could offer fertile ground for teams to close the gap to the front.
“I think at the end of the day, next year is also going to be an interesting year because there is such a big change of regulation in 2026 that I see,” said Gasly. “I’m already thinking also like 2026 is the big opportunity for everyone to get on top of the regulation and get a winning car.”
Being an F1 driver through Gasly’s eyes
Whenever I am lucky enough to spend time with a driver, I turn the conversation to the general theme of what it takes to do their job. In F1 there are only 20 drivers on the grid at a time, a fraternity smaller than the list of starting quarterbacks in the NFL. Not many get to do this job, and fewer still are those that can run at the front, or win a Grand Prix like Gasly has.
So I asked him the first question I ask every driver: What is the toughest thing about being an F1 driver?
Gasly’s answer was one I had not heard before.
“It’s the dream life. I would not change it for anything, but probably getting only like 50 days a year home. You will still have the day of training.
So, you know, you get a very limited amount of time where you can sort of have a normal life,” began Gasly. “And then from these 50 days you got to deal between family, partner, girlfriend, your friends, and also yourself because, you know, we all need time for ourselves as well. So it’s always trying to compromise.”
Gasly conceded that that demanding schedule means some are left unhappy.
“[The] tricky thing is no one is happy at the end because they wish they could have more time with you. I would say it’s the limited personal time you get in your life.”
Gasly also found a silver lining of sorts, in that, there will be opportunities down the road to play catch-up.
“This career doesn’t go forever. So I know the stuff I’m missing right now.
I have all the time to recover from it once I finish my career in Formula One,” continued Gasly. “But for sure there are things happening right now, unique moments which you miss out because we have a very busy schedule, which you won’t recover.
“But it’s part of the life we have.”
I then asked Gasly what was the one thing he wished people in my showed understood about what it takes to be an F1 driver, and he pointed to the schedule, and the increasing demands on his time. What fans see on a Saturday during qualifying, or during a race on Sunday, is just a fraction of what it takes to be at a driver’s best.
“It’s probably the intensity of the schedule. You know, people look at us on Sunday and think, ‘ok, that was a race there and that’s it.’ But it’s a flight every three days, constantly changing time zones, training five or six days a week, and still having that energy to be on top of our shape compared to other sports,” described Gasly. “I love football, for example.
“And I have a couple of friends, they go to practice at their training ground every day, they play half the games at their home. I’m working out in this gym here at the hotel. Next week, I’m going to be in Mexico working in a different environment. And the week after I’m going to be in Sao Paulo with another three-to-four hours time difference after a nine-hour flight.
“And I’ll go for a one-hour run and yesterday I came from a ten-hour flight and the first thing I did was to go out and run for 45 minutes.
“And it’s not so much the workouts we do. But it’s just when you add up from the start of the year, until the end of the year, and you see how much you’ve done, whether it’s in activity, whether it’s at the track of the track, it’s just, it’s a pretty insane schedule.”
I then asked Gasly about some of the friendships he has cultivated with fellow drivers on the grid, such as former teammate Yuki Tsunoda, and Charles Leclerc. With the list of F1 drivers being such a small group, I wondered if having friendships and relationships with other drivers, people who are also among the few tasked with traveling the world and pushing high-performance machines to the absolute limit, provided a benefit.
Gasly responded by outlining the difference between his F1 life, and what he termed his “normal” life, which helps keep him grounded.
“I always say the way I stay grounded is by, you know, I’m lucky I have four brothers. I know where I come from. I go back home sometimes to the same house I grew up in,” began Gasly. “I see the same people that I was with before. I was an F1 driver and that’s very important for me. Because I always say there is a real life, and there is the F1 life.
“I know everything I’m living now, you can’t take it as a standard because I know we get to stay in the best, five-star hotels. Fly in the best conditions, having access to all the most successful people, athletes, and businessmen. We really get a privileged life but I know it’s not the real life.
“The real life is what I used to have before Formula One. And my life will be different after F1.”
Gasly then talked about how it helps to be able to talk about that “F1” life with some of his peers.
“I can talk normal life with everybody and I can talk with Charles and Yuki. But F1 life, I can’t talk about it with everyone because not everybody will understand or will perceive it. And there are topics, for example, I know I only discussed with Charles,” added Gasly. “They are stuff that we tell each other that we feel comfortable exchanging and having each other’s opinion that we would not be comfortable to exchange with people we are very close with, but not from this world.”
Pierre Gasly: Sports fan
The conversation then turned to the bigger sporting world. Gasly is a sports fan. A big sports fan. When he has the time away from his difficult schedule you might see him at Wimbledon, or the French Open, or various other sporting events.
I wondered if there was a “bucket list” event that he would love to attend. As it turns out, he already checked that off his list, unfortunately with a bit of a bitter end.
The World Cup Final between Argentina and his beloved French side.
“World Cup final. I did that. So, check that one off. Yeah, the emotions I felt like on that day, like in France against Argentina, and the way the game went,” described Gasly, reliving the moment in front of me. “We were completely crap for 60 minutes and I was like, ‘what am I watching?’
Then all of a sudden, I don’t know, they just switched on three gears and the last 30 minutes I really thought, ‘ok, we’re gonna actually recover the two goals and score the third one and win the World Cup Final.’ When everything looked like the other way around and then from believing and I believed it so much, I was sure we were going to win it.
“We actually ended up losing,” added Gasly. “So it was such a roller coaster of emotion, but so glad I went there because it was a beautiful moment for the sport as well. And that’s what I like.
“I just enjoy watching beautiful football.”
Gasly has also grown fond of American football, which you might expect given the presence of Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce as recent investors in Alpine. While Gasly was preparing for the 2024 F1 season, he was up late watching the Kansas City Chiefs win their second-straight Super Bowl.
Does Gasly believe the Chiefs can become the first time in history to win three straight Super Bowls?
You bet he does.
“I like unique stories. So I’ll go for it. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we gotta do. We gotta write these stories,” said Gasly. “So that’ll be amazing for them, and they’re obviously part of the team. I know they love Alpine, and they try to support us as much as they can and we do the same other way around.
“So I think that would be amazing for them.”
Closing out the 2024 season
As our time drew short, I turned to this weekend’s United States Grand Prix, and the rest of the season. This weekend kicks off a tripleheader that, as Gasly described, will take the grid from Austin to Mexico City and finally to São Paulo. How does Gasly see this weekend playing out for him and for Alpine?
“Well, last year we had a great race finishing sixth. So usually we did pretty well on this track and it’s a track I really enjoy for different reasons.
First of all, I’m always happy to come to America. Big cities, big trucks, big roads, everything is gigantic,” described Gasly. “I used to have some family living here in the past, in the past years they moved out, but it was always a fun weekend going to the track. You have hundreds of thousands of fans. I think the most attended race of the year which makes the race very special.
“So I can’t say I’ve had a single, bad time in Texas.
“And I think that’s, you know, every time you go back to a place you kind of go back to the memories. And for me, it’s always been a good weekend. So looking forward to it again.”
The conversation closed with a question about the rest of the season, and what Gasly would consider a positive end to the 2024 campaign for himself, and for Alpine.
“I’m not going to go with, you know, a position because it would not be the right target for me. The target is really to see that we’ve developed the car from where we are at the moment,” began Gasly. “I think we kind of started badly, kind of managed to make some progress and then kind of like got out-developed a bit by some other teams. So we kind of went back a bit now.
“We have a couple of upgrades coming and I think it will be important to finish in Abu Dhabi in a definitely better position that we are in. Whether it will be good enough to fight for points, I don’t know. Obviously, I hope so.
“But as long as I just see whatever we’re working on actually delivers on track, then it brings some confidence into the tools and development we are doing and that will mean that what we’re doing for next year will also bring us in a much better, much better spot.”
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