Pierre Gasly has revealed how a handful of early mistakes at Red Bull turned the tide against him at the team. In a revealing piece written for the Players Tribune, the French driver also opened up about the harrowing experience of losing his friend, Anthoine Hubert, just days after he was sent back to Toro Rosso. "From the moment I made my first mistake in a car, I felt like people there [at Red Bull] slowly began to turn on me," Gasly posited. "I’d had a crash in winter testing, and from that moment on the season never really got going. Then I had a tough first two races with Red Bull and the media just ate me up." His struggles at Red Bull were well documented throughout the early months of the 2019 season, and were later mirrored by those of Alex Albon, who was similarly hindered by comparisons to teammate Max Verstappen. For Gasly, he felt as if the pressures were all too much, as he didn't have sufficient support behind him to overcome his early issues with the Red Bull car. "Anything I said in the press was twisted into an excuse for my form, and nobody really stuck up for me," Gasly continued. "It was a difficult time for me at Red Bull because I didn’t feel like I was really supported and treated the same way as others there have been. "I was working my ass off every day, trying to get results for the team, but I was not being given all the tools I needed to succeed. I would try to offer solutions, but my voice wasn’t heard, or it would take weeks to see changes." The year 2019 was about to get infinitely worse for the 25-year-old, whose close friend Anthoine Hubert tragically died in an F2 feature race at Spa. Gasly recounts having to come to terms with the loss of Hubert, whom he grew up racing in karting and junior Formulas. "You know, when Jules Bianchi was killed in a crash in 2015 ... it was the first time in a long time that someone from our generation of racers, at any level, had died. It happened a lot 40 or 50 years ago, but now? No. No. "I was completely broken. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I’ve never experienced a worse feeling than that in my life. Never."
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