Red Bull have confirmed Pierre Gasly will leave their junior team AlphaTauri at the end of the season, one year earlier than planned.
His destination is Alpine, where he will take the seat which Fernando Alonso is to vacate. Alpine’s new hire will form an all-French line-up with their current driver Esteban Ocon.
Gasly began 2022 with two years left on his Red Bull contract, which kept him at AlphaTauri for this season. That initially left open which of Red Bull’s Formula 1 teams he would drive for the year after.
But Sergio Perez’s contract extension at Red Bull in May ended Gasly’s hopes of returning to the top team. Gasly drove alongside Max Verstappen during the first half of 2019 before he was demoted back to his current team.
Gasly’s future began to look less certain over the summer after Alonso confirmed his surprise move from Alpine to Aston Martin. That kickstarted the F1 ‘silly season’ and left Alpine searching for a driver to partner Ocon.
Despite his Red Bull contract, Gasly has emerged as the most likely candidate. Meanwhile reports emerged AlphaTauri were in talks with Formula E champion and recent F1 debutant Nyck de Vries about joining the team for 2023.
Gasly, now 26, was signed to the Red Bull Junior Team after he won the 2013 Formula Renault Eurocup when he was 17. He spent two-and-a-half winless years in Formula Renault 3.5 and GP2 (now Formula 2) before a breakthrough in 2016 which resulted in winning the GP2 title.
But instead of moving him into F1, Red Bull placed Gasly in Japan’s Super Formula series and handed him a debut in Formula E. The team eventually gave Gasly his F1 break at Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri) with a five-race spell at the end of 2017.
Besides his short-lived stint at Red Bull over the first 12 races of 2019, Gasly has been at the Faenza-based team ever since. He claimed his first F1 win with the team in the 2020 Italian Grand Prix.
This article will be updated
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