Gasly wants Alpine to prove Miami pace in Canada

Pierre Gasly says Alpine’s unexpectedly strong Miami weekend will only really matter if the team can carry that pace to Canada, after a run of early-season results that already eclipses its entire 2025 points total.

Gasly left Miami "cautiously optimistic" after Alpine emerged as one of the standout teams in the midfield. He took eighth in the sprint, while Franco Colapinto was promoted to seventh in the Grand Prix after Charles Leclerc received a 20-second penalty. That lifted Alpine to 23 points after four rounds.

The significance of that total is hard to miss. Alpine scored only 22 points across the whole of the 2025 season and finished last in the constructors' championship, so the team has already moved beyond last year’s return before the 2026 campaign has properly settled.

For Gasly, Miami was the clearest sign yet that Alpine’s reset toward the new rules is paying off. He said the team had deliberately accepted short-term pain during its difficult 2025 season, even as criticism grew from outside, because it had already chosen to stop looking backward. As Gasly put it, Alpine had "agreed to draw a line under the previous regulations and focus on this one."

That is why he sees the next race as the key check on whether Miami was a breakthrough or just a favorable circuit. "Obviously, I hope it will be the same in Canada," Gasly said. "In Miami, we were surprisingly good compared to the rest of the midfield." He added that there would be more work over the next two weeks, but that it had been important to capitalize on the form shown in the United States and "make sure to keep this performance advantage in Canada."

Gasly also made clear Alpine has not solved everything. He admitted he was short of Colapinto over one lap in Miami and said there were still "three or four tenths" to find on his side, which he linked to traction problems. He also suggested the field may be more spread out than expected, with the gap to the cars ahead larger than Alpine initially thought.

That warning is shared inside the team. Team principal Steve Nielsen said Alpine’s improvement versus 2025 is real and noticeable, but he does not expect the competitive picture from Miami to automatically carry over to Montreal because rival teams will keep bringing updates and the pecking order can shift quickly from track to track.

Even with that caveat, Miami strengthened Gasly’s belief that Alpine’s decision to sacrifice 2025 for a stronger 2026 was the right one. The team now has proof that the project can deliver points, but Canada will show whether it can turn one surprisingly strong weekend into a sustainable midfield advantage.