We switch back to chat mode – and get into his unfortunately short stint at Red Bull. “I’m not going to lie, it was sad,” he says. “2019, my second year in Formula 1 – there was no support from anywhere, in a very big team which is very much supporting Max [Verstappen] – for good reasons, because he’s put on the results.
“But I’m starting with a fresh engineer coming from Formula E who didn’t have experience in F1. So it was a strange dynamic. I wasn’t really given the tools to really perform. I tried to fight my own way because I wanted, and at the end of the day I’m there to, perform. They were not happy, but I’m not happy too because I could see I couldn’t show my potential.”
Gasly was demoted back to Toro Rosso after around six months of racing. “It almost felt like a relief,” he says. His first race back was the Belgian Grand Prix and it turned out to be the most intense weekend of his life. Naturally, all the questioning on media day was about his demotion.
“It’s not a nice energy,” he says. “I’m there to do my thing and try and give my best but it’s a lot of negativity. I go through that. I just want to drive. Then came Saturday…”
His friend Anthoine Hubert, with whom he raced in karting from aged nine to around 14, suffered a fatal accident on the second lap of the F2 feature race at Spa, at the same venue where Gasly was set to compete in his first race back with Toro Rosso.
Gasly and Hubert were like brothers growing up. They ate breakfast together, went to class together, trained together. Gasly would do 13 push ups, so Hubert would do 14. They pushed each other to get the very best out of each other.
“Initially, I didn’t know who was involved,” says Gasly, “It looked bad. The team manager told me Anthoine was involved. As soon as the briefing was done, I ran down to get more info. I saw in the distance my parents just broken in tears. Sadly I understood straight away what had happened.”
