Pierre Gasly has given Alpine one of the most unlikely qualifying results of the 2026 Formula 1 season, putting his Enstone machine ahead of both Red Bull entries at a Suzuka weekend that even the team's most optimistic supporters struggled to see coming.
The sheer improbability of it — Alpine finished at the bottom of the 2025 constructors' standings — was the first thing pundits kept coming back to in their post-qualifying analysis.
"When you look at the likes of Arvin Lindlood and Isaac Hajar like being new drivers coming into this Red Bull setup and you think someone like Pier Gazzley who's been in that team mad experience putting in laps outqualifying Red Bulls in an Alpine which finished last last season let's remember kind of mad," one analyst said of the lap.
A second voice agreed with the verdict, and with the driver responsible for it.
"It is mad. I love his gun," they said of Gasly.
The qualifying result is the latest data point in a quietly emerging trend: Alpine, a year after scraping the bottom of the grid, is now genuinely relevant in the midfield, and Gasly is the driver delivering on it.
What makes the Suzuka lap especially remarkable is how hard 2026's new energy deployment rules have been on experienced drivers. Much of the paddock has struggled to get the new dance of ICE power, battery harvest and energy release right, and the consequences can be a lost lap — or worse — if the wrong button is pressed at the wrong time. Alpine had their own turn in that barrel in China, where Gasly was visibly frustrated with how the formation lap and opening stint unfolded.
"If I got to be honest, I did exactly what I've been told and it was clearly not," Gasly said of that Chinese Grand Prix weekend. "Um, I mean, we're still learning. Um, it is very complex. Um, I think it's it's just the complexity of these rules and we'll have to get used to it and there must have there is a reason why it didn't work. So, I just got to make sure that next time I'm I'm in a better position. Uh, we see the formation lap we got to do. Before it was all about the tires, which is the most important. Now, it's unfortunately it got it's got to be secondary. Um, a lot is about the engine and um yeah, it is what it is."
By Shanghai, Alpine had already turned that learning into a tangible result — a P6 finish — although Gasly insisted he had been chasing better.
"Bit of a change compared to the last 12 months. So, you know, we'll take that. I think overall um yeah, very happy with the the work we've done as a team this weekend," Gasly said after China. "Deep inside me the very competitive Pier is slightly mad not to get that P5 because I think I add it at the start before the safety car."
In Suzuka, that competitiveness translated into a qualifying lap that outstripped Red Bull's more experienced race-winning package, and exposed just how much of 2026 is now about how well a driver adapts to the rulebook rather than the raw pace of the chassis.
The Red Bull side of the story is its own problem. With Arvid Lindblad and Isack Hadjar — both rookies promoted from Racing Bulls — now anchoring the main team's line-up in Max Verstappen's absence from pace-setting position, Red Bull have been left with two drivers still learning what the car can do while Gasly, with nearly a decade of race experience to draw on, extracts everything out of a theoretically slower machine.
Alpine won't get carried away. The 2026 season has already shown that form can swing dramatically weekend to weekend, and the team's own engineers remain cautious about declaring a permanent step forward. But for one Saturday in Suzuka, Gasly delivered exactly the kind of lap that gets talked about for years — and did it in a car no one outside Enstone thought belonged in the top ten, let alone ahead of Red Bull.
Source: youtube.com