Formula 1: Was too much expected of Pierre Gasly at Red Bull Racing?

After just 12 races, Pierre Gasly was demoted from Red Bull Racing to Toro Rosso during the Formula 1 summer break. Was too much expected of him?

Becoming the teammate to Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen is no small task considering the fact that he has been arguably the most in-form driver in Formula 1 since his practice crash for the Monaco Grand Prix in May of 2018.

That is the role that Pierre Gasly landed himself for the 2019 season last August after Daniel Ricciardo made the shocking decision to leave the Milton Keynes-based team and join Renault on a two-year contract.

But Gasly quickly found out how hard it is to keep up with the 21-year-old Dutchman, and his start to the 2019 season was disastrous.

More from Formula One

While both Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner and manager Helmut Marko stated that the team would not look to replace the 23-year-old Frenchman before the 2019 season concluded, they ultimately pulled the plug during the summer break after just 12 of the season’s 21 races had been completed.

They ended up promoting rookie Alexander Albon from Scuderia Toro Rosso, effectively the Red Bull Racing junior team, and demoting Gasly back to Toro Rosso, where he spent all of his rookie season in 2018.

But was too much expected of Gasly at Red Bull Racing?

Last season, he outscored teammate Brendon Hartley 29 to 4, giving him 87.88% of the team’s points, the highest percentage among all drivers. He recorded a fourth place finish, Honda’s best finish in nearly 10 years, in just his second start of the season in the Bahrain Grand Prix, and he finished as the “best of the rest” in the Hungarian Grand Prix as well.

But as dominant as he seemed, he really wasn’t. He and Hartley were both classified has having retired from five of the season’s 21 races, and he only scored points in two more races (five to three) than Hartley did.

Given Ricciardo’s shocking departure from Red Bull Racing, it was clear, even with how “dominant” Gasly had been, that Red Bull Racing’s promotion of him was somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction.

They could have promoted Carlos Sainz Jr., who was technically a Renault driver on loan from Red Bull Racing at the time, but they decided against it, most likely due to his history with Verstappen.

And the fact that McLaren signed him in the meantime.

That said, to answer the initial question posed by this article, no, too much was not expected of Gasly at Red Bull Racing.

His success at Toro Rosso clearly hyped him up to the point where much more was expected of him than there probably should have been to begin with when, in reality, he was never going to challenge Verstappen. But that does not change the fact that he could not perform at the minimum level needed to remain with the team.

Upon his replacement, Gasly had recorded just five top six finishes, and he failed to finish ahead of another Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Scuderia Ferrari or Red Bull Racing driver on pace alone. He was regularly battling with the mid-pack drivers of McLaren and Alfa Romeo Racing instead of with the top five drivers like he should have been.

In fact, in each of the spans from the one-race span to the nine-race span leading into his demotion, he had been outscored by McLaren’s Carlos Sainz Jr.

With 63 points, he sat just five points ahead of Sainz for sixth place in the driver standings. Meanwhile, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc sat in fifth with 132 points, 69 points ahead of Gasly and with 75 points in the last six races, and Verstappen sat in third with 181 points, including 81 in the last four races.

Next. Top 10 Formula 1 drivers of all-time. dark

Expectations were high for Pierre Gasly entering the 2019 Formula 1 season, but they were not too high; Red Bull Racing were definitely justified in demoting him after the start that he had, and the fact that he finished behind teammate Daniil Kvyat in the Belgian Grand Prix, his first race back at Toro Rosso, proved it.

Even in what was just his sixth point-scoring race in 28 races driving for Toro Rosso, he was outscored by Kvyat. Kvyat’s seventh place finish netted him six points. In the other 27 races during which Gasly drove for the Faenza-based team, his teammates combined to score only four points, illustrating that his “dominance” was highly overrated.

Home/Formula One