27-year-old F1 driver says he had the unluckiest start to a season in his whole career

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Alpine driver Pierre Gasly has admitted that the start of the 2023 season was the unluckiest he’s ever been in his racing career.

Gasly was lamenting the start to life at his new team on the Beyond The Grid Podcast.

Formula 1 is braced for one of the least eventful off-season’s in some time with only one seat not confirmed for 2024 and Logan Sargeant looking like the most likely candidate to keep his place at Williams.

It means there’s arguably no excuse for any driver not to be at their very best next year with most of the grid’s contracts up for renewal in 12 months.

One of the drivers who did have to adapt to new surroundings last winter was Pierre Gasly.

The 27-year-old finally left the Red Bull group after making his F1 debut in 2017 with Toro Rosso.

He had a successful spell with Red Bull’s second team and returned to AlphaTauri after a tough few months with the senior outfit.

Gasly decided to join Alpine for the 2023 season but admits it was the unluckiest period of his career when he first joined the French outfit.

He’s never had the best relationship with new teammate Esteban Ocon and one incident certainly didn’t help matters.

Thankfully, his form has improved since the winter break and he’ll go into 2024 with bragging rights over his fellow countryman as he looks set to finish with a higher points total.

Gasly says Alpine start was unluckiest period of his career

Speaking about his improved recent results, Gasly said: “It’s always been really good for me the summer break, I won my first race after the summer break.

“I’ve always had a great second part of the year but I will put it down to the first part of the year was obviously a lot of learning and getting to know each other with the team.

“So the communication, the efficiency you get from the time you spend with the team and the understanding of what type of car I need, in terms of whether it’s car setup and the direction I want to take.

“It doesn’t click straight away, they need to understand my driving style, the way I speak with them, the comments I make about the car and the understanding of which way we’re going to set things up around me.

“It took some time and on top of that, I don’t think I’ve ever been as unlucky at the start of the year than I have been in Formula 1.

“We were involved in some tricky situations, looking at Melbourne, we had an amazing race with two laps to go we dropped 10 points, so this was pretty tough.

“There was Monaco, we were running in third and made a wrong strategy call which cost me the third place. It just felt a bit sub-optimal, the potential was there.”

Luck is temporary, but Gasly’s ability is undeniable

There were a few events that summed up why Gasly’s start to life at Alpine was the unluckiest period of his career.

In Melbourne, with he and Ocon both set to score decent points, the pair collided during a chaotic restart, seeing them both miss out.

As he mentions, he should have scored more points in Monaco, although Ocon benefitted from that bad luck and secured his only podium of the season.

The pair then both suffered DNFs at Silverstone and in Hungary which saw a change in the senior management of the team.

Gasly is undoubtedly very quick and his brief time at a top team didn’t go to plan a few years ago.

He’s now a more mature and quicker driver and it would be interesting to see how he coped in a potentially race-winning car.

Alpine will hope they can deliver that for him and Ocon in 2024.