F1 News: Alpine tasks Pierre Gasly with elevating the team "to a new level"
Alpine hopes Pierre Gasly can elevate the team's performance in 2023, as the French squad hopes to fight with the front-runners.
The Enstone-based team has a solid foundation to build upon for next season, designing a fairly competitive A522 machine to start F1's latest regulation change.
Alpine's reliability was easily its most significant weakness in 2022, given that they often led the midfield in terms of pure performance.
Despite this relatively encouraging campaign, the gap to Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes remains significant.
Pierre Gasly's arrival was an unexpected twist in the driver market this season as Alpine scrambled to find a replacement for the departing Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri.
Although questions have been raised about whether Gasly can push Alpine to the front of the field, Alpine's CEO Laurent Rossi (as quoted by gpfans) has clear expectations:
"You need to be able to give feedback to the team and take the whole team in the right direction, so the car improves.
"So that's what we hope Pierre is going to bring. He was a technical leader in many ways, I guess, at AlphaTauri.
"We want him to continue doing that, grow the team, grow himself with us and take us to a new level."
Gasly's partnership with Esteban Ocon will face considerable scrutiny next season, given the dicey history between the two drivers.
Aside from the inter-team struggles that could emerge in 2023, Alpine's driver pairing must prove capable of competing at a level beyond the midfield if they are to move the team forward.