UNEXPECTEDLY; Pierre Gasly French motorsports racing driver terminate his contract with Alpine and announce….
The Four Seasons in downtown Austin, Texas is the kind of place one visits if they want to be seen. The line up to the valet parking stand is filled with luxury vehicles, with people dressed to the nines either getting out of them to check into the hotel or make their way to the lobby bar, or getting into them for a night on the town.
It is the kind of hotel where the lobby vending machine dispenses bottles of Moët & Chandon, and if you are a sportswriter who just got off a flight and is still wearing jeans and a hoodie, you might get asked a few times by the friendly staff just what, exactly, you are doing there.
However, on this Wednesday afternoon, this particular sportswriter had a solid answer:
I was there to ask a Formula 1 driver about his dog.
The driver in question? Pierre Gasly of Alpine, and a former Grand Prix winner. The dog in question? The adorable Simba, who along with other F1 pups like Leo (Leclerc) and Roscoe (Hamilton) has captivated the fan base. So much so that when I put out the clarion call for questions ahead of my time with Gasly, Simba was a popular topic.
As our conversation began, the incredibly friendly Gasly was willing to humor me.
“Well, Simba is growing slowly into a very naughty, naughty little toy poodle. But no, yeah, he’s amazing,” began Gasly. “He’s six months old now. Three kilograms. I don’t understand how he’s not like 15 kg with everything he eats, but I’m a foodie myself. So it just makes it quite funny. And he is a very cute, cute little puppy.
“So loving.”
Eventually, with talk of dogs subsiding, we did turn the conversation to racing.
The 2024 Formula 1 season was a slow start for Gasly and Alpine, and the driver was candidly honest in his assessment.
“It’s been very tough. You know, on one hand, we knew it was going to be a very difficult start already back then in January, we knew the car wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” began Gasly. “And yeah, it was just kind of a flop in Bahrain when we qualified both guys on the last row.”
As Gasly outlined, the focus for Alpine after that difficult start was on the in-season development of the A524, the team’s challenger for the 2024 F1 campaign. That was a deliberate process, which finally saw the team breakthrough with their first points of the season at the Miami Grand Prix in May.