Formula 1: two French drivers for the Alpine team in 2023

Published on: 08/10/2022 – 10:53 Pierre Gasly will join Esteban Ocon in 2023 to form a duo of French drivers within Alpine, with the aim of helping the French team to regain the heights in the championship of the world. Normandy reunited. The Normans Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon will form a duo of tricolor pilots from 2023 within the French Alpine team, a “blue-white-red” association far from being unprecedented in Formula 1… but the first for a long time. Two Frenchmen at the wheel of the same single-seater – and what’s more French herself: it’s been almost thirty years since F1 has known such a configuration. We have to go back to 1994 – two years before the birth of Gasly and D ‘Ocon – to find the last French duo in a French team.>> To read also: “F1: no French GP in 2023, Spa and Monaco threatened… Historic circuits towards the exit?” At the time, Olivier Panis and Éric Bernard raced together for the Auvergne manufacturer Ligier. For lack of satisfactory results, Bernard will not finish the season and will be replaced first by the Briton Johnny Herbert, for a GP, then by the French Franck Lagorce for the last two races of the season. Ligier will finish 6th in the constructors’ classification, Panis 11th among the drivers.Before them, the associations succeeded one another from the creation of the F1 world championship in 1950, with, among others, the pair Maurice Trintignant-Robert Manzon for the French team Gordini.At the time, however, the championship was very different from what is currently being played out: the teams could, for example, have more than two drivers, unlike today, and it was common for drivers not to compete in all the races on the calendar. Many associations French In the early 1980s, 100% French associations were numerous. And sometimes victorious. Among them, in 1980, Ligier signed the best performance in its history by finishing in second place in the constructors’ championship thanks to its drivers Jacques Lafitte and Didier Pironi. A year later, in 1981, René Arnoux and Alain Prost , future quadruple world champion in the discipline, enabled Renault to take third place in the constructors’ championship. A performance renewed the following year with these same drivers. In 1982, Arnoux won the Grand Prix de France ahead of Prost, Pironi and Tambay. Four Frenchmen in the first four places, the party at home. If we thus find almost essentially duos of French pilots at the French teams, others have also had the good days of foreign teams: Patrick Tambay and René Arnoux were aligned together on behalf of the Italian Ferrari in 1983… with the key to a world constructors’ title, even if the championship of the pilots was won by the Brazilian Nelson Piquet in front of Prost. Then, in 1991, came the turn of the same Alain Prost and Jean Alesi, to form a French pair at Ferrari, with frankly mixed results. With AFP