Gasly's assimilation within Alpine 'close' says team boss

Pierre Gasly's move to Alpine was seen as a pivotal point in his Formula 1 career, having spent most of it in the Red Bull stable.

The Frenchman was initially promoted to the main Red Bull team but was swapped in favour of Alex Albon in 2019 due to ailing performances. He went on to prove himself in AlphaTauri by taking the team's second race win, holding off Carlos Sainz at the 2020 Italian Grand Prix.

Making the switch to Alpine for this year, Gasly had big shoes to fill replacing Fernando Alonso but has so far struggled to match his results.

So far Gasly's highest finish is P8 at the Miami Grand Prix, which was a good bounce back from the difficult weekend in Baku and the unfortunate incident which took out teammate Esteban Ocon in Melbourne.

Miami turned out to be one of his best weekends of the season, as he also made it through to Q3 in qualifying and started P5 on the grid.

Szafnauer: You can tell he's one of us now

Even though it's only been five races at the team, Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer believes Gasly is 'close' to embedding himself within the French outfit.

"Not that much further. I mean, should I say is he 100%? It's hard to know, in five races but he's very close," he told media, including RacingNews365.com.

"I mean sitting in the debrief [you can tell] he's one of us now saying 'Oh, yeah, you know, I pushed a little bit too hard here that hurt me a little bit here'.

"He gets the car and the engineers and we're making progress."