After being battered into a rapid Red Bull demotion by Max Verstappen in 2019, Pierre Gasly knows what it is like to be hammered by a team-mate who is making the most out of a difficult Formula 1 car.
But it has not stopped Gasly dishing a similar treatment out to two team-mates this year, which has contributed to the ongoing driver dilemma faced by Alpine while bailing out F1's most troubled team at the same time.
Gasly is doing a good job mimicking Verstappen's tendency to handle a car's extremities better than his colleagues. He is 13th in the championship, ahead of drivers from Aston Martin, Williams, Racing Bulls, Red Bull, Haas and Sauber, in a car that neither of his team-mates Jack Doohan or Franco Colapinto have yet scored a single point in.
And he has made it into Q3 seven times out of 12, in a car capable of scoring points in just three grands prix (Gasly's other point came in a fortunate circumstance in the Miami sprint).
The latest qualifying triumph, at Silverstone, was Gasly at his very best. His Q2 lap to sneak into the top 10 shootout by half a tenth of a second was 0.6s faster than he had gone in Q1 - which was not a reflection of a weak first segment. Alpine had gone into qualifying expecting a double early elimination, given its cars were two of the three slowest in both FP2 and FP3.
"That lap in Q2 was very, very…I was very happy with it," said a visibly pumped Gasly after that session.
"Like, just every corner was absolutely on the edge and came perfectly and just got through it in P10. But looking at the pace, we would have never imagined to get there."
Alpine deserves credit for that too, just like when Gasly was in Q3 in Austria it clearly was not just a case of colossally outperforming a terrible car - the A525 is quick, or can be quick. It's just…temperamental, at best.
The all-round package has limitations. The car's stiff, and lacking downforce (although it works well at high speed). Sometimes it lacks grip, sometimes it has poor ride quality, and almost always it's lacking power and sufficient energy harvesting/deployment. That made life tough for Doohan and has been central to Colapinto struggling to make the same impact he did when he stood in at Williams last year.
But when the weaknesses are mitigated and the strengths shine through, the car is very good. It's just only Gasly who has really shown it.
He's still capable of having a few anonymous weekends in a season, and sometimes he gets pulled into a misery spiral like in that horrible Austria race, but at his best there are few as effective as Gasly is, especially in the midfield. His qualifying peaks - fifth in Bahrain, eighth in Spain, ninth in Britain - show that.
"I think I've done a few this year in quali," Gasly said when asked by The Race if his Silverstone Q2 lap was his best of the year.
"I really feel honestly I managed to get a lot out of the car even though I really didn't feel good in the car. I couldn't really drive it the way I wanted, but just tried to find ways to make laptime [while] being uncomfortable with it.
"In some ways that [the Silverstone lap] is probably the one that felt less natural, but where we still managed to get a very strong performance out of it."
That's, again, a little like Verstappen. 'I'm not happy with this car, but I can be quick in it'. The problem is that Alpine's problems usually snowball on Sundays. That's why Gasly has such a big discrepancy between Q3 appearances and points finishes. At Silverstone, conditions played a part in overcoming that - both Gasly and Alpine managed a very tricky race perfectly.
But just a week before, in Austria, came an example of the exact opposite: a catastrophic race that unravelled early on as the car burned through its tyres excessively.
"There's so much convergence between all the cars this year compared to last year, that some of our weaknesses are magnified by an order of magnitude," said Alpine technical head David Sanchez.
"I tell people downforce is like paracetamol, it fixes every problem.
"What we have in high speed corners, we're not too shy. We know we're on the back foot with energy recovery. Some races we are exposed, and this is sometimes biasing our choice of downforce level.
"In Austria, we made some choices to try and be a bit racier, but this of course puts a bit more stress on rear tyres and the consequences are quite heavy."
It seems an extreme manifestation of the classic F1 problem where new tyres and low fuel can help mask limitations that get exposed more brutally through a stint, and a whole grand prix. Gasly explained the experience well during the Silverstone weekend when asked by The Race to explain his qualifying overachievements and the problems that cause such issues in the race.
"Overall we slide a lot, which on a new tyre, manage at times to just get some decent performance out of it," Gasly said.
"But ultimately, in a race condition, when you have more degradation, hotter conditions, etc, it's not something which is competitive over a full race distance.
"We know at the moment when we go into qualifying, it's most likely that we get knocked out in Q1.Then inside the car you just try to do the best job you can and hope that some other guys leave a little bit on the table, and then try to get to the next stage.
"In qualifying generally, I'm feeling like I'm able to really extract a lot from the car. Obviously it's difficult to drive and it's not easy. I do feel that, pushing to the extreme, limit and unfortunately in Q3 [in Austria] didn't quite go exactly as I wanted in the last outing.
"But that's all we can do really because that's what we have to fight. We're clearly not on the right end of the midfield and we'll have to have a risky approach.
"We also know why, since the start of the year, we want to focus on 2026, which I fully back the team for doing it. It also means that we didn't develop that car as much as some other teams might have done it. It put us a bit on the back foot for this year with hopefully some better dividends for next year."
That reality is why Alpine needs bailing out this year. It is last in the championship for a reason: a flawed package, sure, but also it's a one-car team as far as the standings go. That's very Red Bull. Were it not for its lead driver the situation would look even more bleak. But there is, for now, the caveat that Alpine can point to: a broader plan that requires sacrificing this season, and not getting pulled into trying to turn things around by upgrading the car.
It is putting a huge emphasis on 2026, when it switches to being a Mercedes customer. Its development focus is all on that project, which is something that has paid off previously. Remember, it was only three years ago in 2022 (pictured below) that Team Enstone built the fourth-best car, having done very well at the start of the current rules era. Alpine should be taken more seriously than the various crises sparked by senior management tend to make it…
"For the rest of the year, we keep going with the car, trying to get the most out of it, especially in the most consistent way," said Sanchez.
"We know when we get the car at the peak, the peak is not too bad. We're trying to be there for as much as we can.
"We know for us, with bigger opportunities in 2026, we may not have been pushing so deep in the season with development like some others.
"But when we see how next year's car is evolving and the rate is quite high, we are quite happy with that choice."
It should be noted that there's a risk that a big assumption is being on 'change the engine, fix all the ills'. There could be a touch of the old McLaren arrogance with its weak Honda engine a decade or so ago, when McLaren was convinced its car-designing capabilities were still mighty and it was just a rubbish power unit holding it back.
McLaren found out the hard way that wasn't the case (ironically when it switched to Renault power from Honda). Only time will tell if Alpine faces a repeat, but for now it's short-term pain in the hope of a long-term gain. And the A525 goes largely untouched, leaving Gasly knowing it will be a battle to avoid finishing last in the championship, and a case of trying to overachieve wherever possible.
"As an athlete, that's probably the hardest to deal with," he said at Silverstone.
"You put in a lot of effort, put in a lot of sweat, a lot of sacrifices. When you see someone sometimes stepping on the podium who doesn't do the right job but gets the right car, then obviously when you're finishing outside the points, feeling like you've done everything you could with the car you have, it's not very satisfying going back on Sunday night back home.
"But I know what we're going through. I can see the positivity. I have a lot of expectations from the team for 2026. We've made some quite strong choices in terms of development, which we're paying a bit the price for this season.
"If it's all to give us a chance to fight for real positions, podiums and running at the front next year, I'll do it any day of the week. At the minute we just need to focus on what's right ahead of us.
"It's part of my job to just overcome these difficulties even though it's not an enjoyable position."
