Jack Doohan has joined Pierre Gasly at Alpine for the 2025 Formula 1 season, replacing Esteban Ocon who now sits alongside Ollie Bearman at Haas. Doohan has been under immense pressure after rumours began circulating that reserve driver Franco Colapinto is being lined up to replace him if he doesn’t perform. Gasly has now spoken on this.
This is an important year for the young Australian. Not only is he under intense pressure internally, but his first race of his F1 career is in front of his home crowd.
Talking to the media, including Motorsport.com, Gasly compared his new teammate to Yuki Tsunoda, his former teammate and good friend from his days at AlphaTauri, now Racing Bulls, before touching on the speculation surrounding his Alpine teammate.
“ I think Jack is slightly more prepared than Yuki was at the time. Still, arriving and landing in F1 with different challenges, so I try to support Jack in the way I can. From my past experience, because I want him to do well.”
Gasly is keen on helping him through the pressure.
“He’s a great guy. I think he’s got talent and there’s been already so much talk, I think it’s important to just let him… At the end of the day, we’ve got the best job in the world, we’re supposed to be here and enjoy every single second being an F1 driver, which is not always easy in this environment, so that’s how you can deal with these emotions and close yourself to make sure that you can deliver 100 percent of your talent with the team and the job, regardless of all these noises around you. So, yeah, I try to help him.”
Jack Doohan, Alpine
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images
Former Haas team principal Guenther Steiner was quick to condemn the rumours surrounding Doohan and Colapinto.
“I think the pressure comes from outside,” he said. “A lot of these things which are happening in F1 is like someone said, ‘Oh, he has got only six races, and then it will be decided’. Somebody said it, somebody repeated it, and it got bigger and bigger.
“I don’t even know if it’s true because nobody knows where it came from. So, for me, it’s an exaggerated rumour.”
He continued:
“Obviously, in F1, it’s not only him under pressure; everyone needs to perform. “If he performs, he will be fine, there will be no problem.
“He has got his father, Mick, the legend, around, so he will help him to go through this pressure he has got on. When you are a race car driver, you have always got pressure.
“I just don’t see where it came from,” he said on the rumours. “It wasn’t an official statement, so if there’s no official statement, I always assume that somebody opened his mouth not knowing what he’s saying, just wanting a headline.
“Jack needs to stay calm, do what he’d good at, race cars, and then the performance will come, and he will be here to stay. I may have simplified it a little bit, but that’s what it is about.”
Joking, Gasly mentions a realisation for Tsunoda earlier in the week:
”It’s funny because I saw Yuki in the car park two days ago and he was mentioning, he said, ‘ah, no, I understand what you felt with me when I joined Formula One. I must have been a pain because now I got Hadjar coming in and I see what it’s like.’
“So it’s like, because he was asking me my age when I think I was 25 when Yuki came in and then Yuki’s 25 now, so it’s like, the roles inverted for him and it was pretty funny.”
