Will Toro Rosso and Honda be a springboard to better things ?
For many young drivers hoping to ride a moneyed wave of high-energy carbonated beverage to the peak of motor racing, the Red Bull Junior Team has proved to be a ghastly business. Now, indubitably, it’s Pierre Gasly’s business, for he is the latest young talent to be thrust onto the F1 stage by this most demanding of up-or-out mechanisms – presided over, as ever, by Red Bull driver consultant, former F1 driver Helmut Marko.
Students of history would determine that the signs aren’t good: in over a decade of separating the wheat
from the chaff, the Red Bull Junior Team has groomed just one world champion. The road towards, through and beyond Sebastian Vettel’s four world titles is littered with the career wreckage of also-rans who were merely quite good. Viewed through Marko’s merciless prism, adequacy equates to inadequacy.
But while Gasly arrives with a spring in his step and a grin on his face – like some but not all of his predecessors – he’s not attended by the miasma of entitlement that several of them exhibited. And when F1 Racing broaches the question of whether Marko has sat him down with a list of must-must-must benchmarks to hit, he doesn’t equivocate about where his priorities lie, or what motivates him.
“Yeah, I think it’s clear. We haven’t had a detailed conversation about targets because it depends on the potential of the car; if you have a midfield car you can’t fight for podiums or wins, so you need to be objective. The main things are to show speed, good racing, to be consistent and to be there when there are chances to score points. For me, the main thing is that what I do, Ido for myself because I love racing. For me, the most important thing is to be happy with my own performance. I’m always looking for perfection, so I’m never really satisfied.”
Uncertainty around the technical package gives Gasly and his team-mate Brendon Hartley – another Junior Team evictee, but one freshly returned from exile – a blank slate from which to work. Late last season, Toro Rosso’s relationship with engine supplier Renault noisily selfdestructed just as Gasly was drafted in to replace Daniil Kvyat. It’s a sign of how desperate the team were to be shot of their partner that they paired up with Honda, whose wares promised little better on the evidence of a woeful 2017.
Over winter the Japanese might have turned that narrative on its head: in pre-season testing it was the nervousness of the STR13 on turn-in that caught the eye rather than a lack of oomph. An air of optimism suffused the garage, shot through with schadenfreude at the predicament of Mclaren, Honda’s ex-partner, whose MCL33 regularly ground to a smoking halt.
“The end of last year was pretty tough with all the [Renault] engine issues we had,” says Gasly. “This year is going to be a big challenge for everyone in the team because we’re not customers any more, it’s a different kind of relationship than before. We have the same targets as Honda
“IN JAPAN, YOU NEED TO BE TRANSPARENT AND STRAIGHTFORWARD BUT IN A VERY DIFFERENT WAY THAN IN EUROPE”
and you really feel that the Japanese and the Italians are working as one team together. The atmosphere and the dynamic is positive.
“The Japanese are pushing massively because they want to show everyone they can make proper engines,” he adds. “And the reliability [in testing] has been good so far. For me, the
Japanese engineers are the most committed people to work with – when they have a target they’ll do anything to achieve it, even if they have to work 20 hours a day. They try everything.”
It’s Gasly’s understanding of this key element of Toro Rosso’s new technical ecosystem that could help him establish himself as the man to take the team forwards. Last season he was parked in Super Formula, Japan’s premier single-seater series, having won the GP2 championship but not convincingly enough for Marko to place him in F1 straight away. Gasly buckled down, got on top of the technical and cultural challenges and became a race winner. Over the winter, Toro Rosso team boss Franz Tost put his staff through training courses in Japanese etiquette to equip them for the new relationship; his new driver had first-hand experience of the silken diplomacy required.
“I didn’t know a year ago how useful it would become for me to live and work in Japan,” he says. “I learned so much about how you communicate and how you approach things if you want to gain trust. You need to be transparent and straightforward but in a very different way than in Europe. Spending a season in Super Formula with Honda helped me to build the trust we have now – there are engineers here who I first met at the start of last year so we already have a good working relationship. Hopefully it will make things easier for all of us.”
What marked Gasly out fundamentally from the driver he replaced last year was his approach to recovering from the engine-related grid penalties that peppered his five grands prix. Not once did he launch a Kvyat-style missile assault at Turn 1 in an effort to make up ground.
“I knew that every lap was important,” he says, “that I had to get as much mileage as possible because that’s how you gain experience, how you learn from the car and make progress. If you ruin your race at Turn 1, it’s not good for the team, also you don’t learn anything. I’ve been trying to build every weekend, racing in a smart way. It will be different this year because I’m doing the full season, and I know the car better. There will be opportunities but you need to understand how much risk to take depending on the situation.”
So is he ready to get his elbows out? After all, no racer can afford a reputation as someone with whom you can take liberties. “Oh that’s right,” he says with an impish grin. “It doesn’t mean you have to crash, but you have to show them…”