Alpine ended season ‘operating at a much higher level’

Pierre Gasly will go into his second season at Alpine expecting to build on the promise he feels they showed over the final races of this year.

While admitting his first year at the team brought some disappointments and frustrations, he also returned to the podium, having failed to reach the rostrum in his last year at AlphaTauri.

“There have been some positives,” said Gasly, who peaked with third place in the Dutch Grand Prix this year and repeated the position in the sprint race at Spa-Francorchamps.

“The obvious ones are the top-three finishes in Spa and Zandvoort. But on the flip side, there were way more challenges than we expected and haven’t been able to match the ambitions and targets that we’ve set ourselves at the start of the year.

“It’s been a challenging year. It’s been disappointing on the results point of view, but I wouldn’t say we had a bad season. I would just say others had a better season and did a better job than we did. That’s the way I look at it.”

The team endured a turbulent season off-track. The departure of CEO Laurent Rossi was followed by the losses of team principal Otmar Szafnauer, sporting director Alan Permane and chief technical officer Pat Fry. Then at the end of the year Davide Brivio, who was originally hired as racing director in 2021 but was soon moved into the role of director of racing expansion projects.

Despite the changes behind the scenes, Gasly was encouraged by the progress the team made at the end of year under interim team principal Bruno Famin.

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“Objectively, we’re finishing the year stronger than we started it,” said Gasly. “I’ve seen a lot of positive evolution, progress and improvements made over the year. And it does give me good hopes for the coming season.”

Gasly came 11th in the standings. After scoring two points on his debut for the team in Bahrain he only added 14 more over the first half of the season. But over the second half he amassed 46.

“We just haven’t been able to have the car to allow us to fight for the results that we were expecting to be more consistently close to the top five and challenge this top three – which we thought would be top three teams, but turned out to be top four at the start of the year with Aston Martin,” said Gasly.

“We’ve just unfortunately been slightly at the back of it on a couple of occasions. On very specific tracks we’ve been…