Pierre Gasly has admitted his relationship with a former Formula 1 team-mate will not be completely fixed for at least a decade after an intense rivalry has developed.
Gasly has been an F1 driver since 2017, coming through the ranks as a Red Bull junior and initially appearing on the grid with the company's second team, which was then called Toro Rosso.
The Frenchman had an ill-fated spell as Max Verstappen's team-mate at Red Bull Racing in 2019 when he replaced the departed Daniel Ricciardo, but lasted only half a season before being demoted back to Toro Rosso.
Gasly achieved his first F1 podium at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, before taking his first victory at the 2020 Italian Grand Prix when Toro Rosso was rebranded as Alpha Tauri.
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Gasly moved to Alpine for 2023 as a replacement for the Aston Martin-bound Fernando Alonso, where he was partnered with fellow Frenchman Esteban Ocon.
The pair spent two seasons as team-mates before Ocon left Alpine towards the end of the 2024 campaign and moved to Haas, where he remains to this day.
Gasly is contracted to Alpine until the end of 2028 and has come off the back of a dismal 2025 campaign for a team which finished last in the Constructors' Championship.
Gasly scored all 22 of Alpine's points last season as he personally finished 18th in the Drivers' Championship.
Gasly and Ocon are both from Normandy in Northern France and were once good friends as kids during their early days of go-karting together.
However, as the two men got older, tensions grew and their relationship soured.
The pair still have a degree of tension in their relationship to this day and speaking recently on an episode of the Off The Grid podcast, the 29-year-old Gasly believes it could be at least a decade before the duo's relationship is back to where it once was.
Gasly said: "Well, Esteban is… yeah, we could make a full documentary about it.
"We used to spend Wednesdays and weekends on track together pretty much every week. Him going to my place, me going to his place. We had a very strong bond.
"Sadly, there was very much like a turning point in one of the races; it sort of just fell apart after that, like in a very dramatic way. A way in which I don’t think we would have even imagined, which is a bit difficult to explain.
"We know exactly where we come from. We know what we had to go through to actually make it. We also both know that it was actually probably a good thing for us that we had a rivalry that pushed us beyond our potential.
"I have no doubt that maybe in 10 years, 20 years, we’ll be able to talk things through in a very different way.
"And there are things that won’t be said until all of that [F1] is over. So at the end of the day, it's a very special relationship."
Topics: Haas F1 Team, Formula 1, Alpine
John McDougall