Pierre Gasly

Pierre Gasly went through something very few drivers survive: he was promoted to the senior team, sent back down mid-season and carried on racing. Red Bull moved him up in 2019 alongside Max Verstappen, gave him twelve races and returned him to Toro Rosso before the summer break.

What he did next is what defines his career. In his second race back he finished second at Interlagos, and the following year he won the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, with a team that had never won and in a race scrambled by a safety car, holding off Carlos Sainz over the closing laps. It is the win of a driver who had just been told he was not good enough.

Since 2023 he has led the Alpine project, his own country's team, where his job is once again to extract points from a car that rarely has more to give. His best championship remains seventh in 2019, the year of the promotion and the demotion, which says plenty about what a driver controls and what he does not.