3 reasons why Pierre Gasly must beat Esteban Ocon this season

Pierre Gasley will team up with Esteban Ocon at Alpine this season. The two French drivers share a history as the two grew up racing together. After experiencing fallout while making their way through the junior categories, the 2023 F1 season sees both of them together in the same team.

For Pierre Gasly, this is a big opportunity as the French driver will be racing for a works team now. This is the first time he will not be a part of the Red Bull setup in any which way since he made his debut in the sport in 2018.

Moving from AlphaTauri to Alpine is surely a step up for Gasly as he moves from a team that finished P9 in the championship last season to a team that finished P4.

Having said that, in Alpine, Pierre Gasly has an uphill task ahead of him. Alpine is a team in the ascendancy and drivers like Gasly could be well-placed to capitalize on the team's rise. In all of this, the first season of the French team is crucial for Gasly and for the sake of his career, he must beat Esteban Ocon at Alpine this season.

The winner becomes the lead driver at Alpine

Alpine is a team in the ascendancy. The team has been slowly gaining momentum over the last couple of years. In 2021, it won a race with Esteban Ocon, and in 2022 it became the leading midfield team in F1 and beat McLaren in the process.

Unlike McLaren, which appears to be stuck in limbo or Aston Martin which appears to have thrown a lot of money into the project and is looking to get to the front as soon as possible, Alpine has taken a more steady approach and built a strong foundation on which the team will continue to make incremental progress.

Will Alpine finally make the jump to the front of the grid? Who knows, what is clear is that in the next two years, the team is looking to make progress closer to the front. In the process, the team will be looking at both Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly to extract the maximum from the car.

It is at this stage that the real battle between the two drivers begins. The driver that ends up beating the other is going to assume the team leader role. For Pierre Gasly, if he cedes ground early to Esteban Ocon then it could become hard for him to make a comeback. In his very first season, Gasly has to beat Ocon to assume leadership at Alpine.

This is his second chance at a works team

Lest we forget, this is a second opportunity for Gasly in a works team. Gasly was first promoted by Red Bull to the senior team after just one year in Torro Rosso. As it turned out, it was a bad idea. Gasly was not ready to drive in front just yet. He still needed some maturing in his skills.

In the last few years since his demotion to AlphaTauri, Gasly has relentlessly worked on improving the perceptions the paddock had of him. He's won a race for AlphaTauri. He's scored multiple pole positions and is now looked at in a much better light.

At Alpine, he gets his shot at redemption. An opportunity to prove to the world that what happened at Red Bull was not the real Pierre Gasly. The real Pierre Gasly is the one that is now a race winner in F1.

At Alpine, if he's unable to beat Ocon, the perception of him being a top driver will take a hit. While he does not have the same fall from grace that he had in 2019, it would severely limit the perception of fans who expected Gasly to be a world champion one day.

Losing to Esteban Ocon could define Pierre Gasly's ceiling in F1

Esteban Ocon is a very strong driver. He outscored Fernando Alonso last season and showed a degree of growth and improvement that wasn't there earlier. However, when we talk about the true elite talent on the F1 grid, Ocon's name is not one that features prominently.

Ocon is good, but is he as good as Max Verstappen, George Russell, Lewis Hamilton, and others? Probably not! If Gasly ends up losing to a driver that is not perceived to be as good as the top-tier drivers on the grid, then what does the future hold for him?

He will not be a team leader at Alpine, he will be looked at as a driver that will give you strong results but is not cut out for the top teams. To prevent that, Pierre Gasly needs to stay on top of his game and beat Esteban Ocon this season.