The F1 driver clash nobody is talking about

Will Charles Leclerc bury Sebastian Vettel's Formula 1 career with his performances at Ferrari this year? Can Valtteri Bottas save his Mercedes place by bouncing back from a difficult second half of 2018? Who will lead the line at Renault - incumbent Nico Hulkenberg or star newcomer Daniel Ricciardo? These are the three big driver storylines of the coming year.

But amid these common (and legitimate) questions, there's another 2019 rivalry that could have a major impact on the season to come. That's despite it barely seeming worthy of a footnote in the eyes of some, simply because it's regarded as a foregone conclusion.

In the neglected case of Max Verstappen versus Pierre Gasly at Honda-powered Red Bull, the assumption is that it will be a walkover - for the former. After all, the ever-improving Verstappen is driver who will surely go on to become a world champion, and Gasly has just a year-and-a-bit of F1 experience and is being pitched into the lion's den. Red Bull is now 'Team Verstappen'.

But it won't be that simple. Gasly might be the junior partner in the alliance (despite being almost 20 months older than Verstappen) but he heads into 2019 on the crest of a three-year wave that took him to GP2 glory, the typhoon-frustrated brink of a Super Formula crown and then a strong start in F1. He will be determined to cause problems for Red Bull this year not through design, but as a consequence of good, old-fashioned pace.

To be a problem, he doesn't have to beat Verstappen over the season. Even matching him is a challenge of Herculean proportions, as Daniel Ricciardo has discovered first-hand over the past couple of years. But Gasly showed enough last season to prove he has the potential to be disruptive to the equilibrium of Verstappen's team. Gasly is, after all, the only obstacle standing between Verstappen and supremacy within Red Bull.

When Ricciardo pulled back from the brink of putting pen to paper on a lucrative one-year deal to stay at Red Bull and made his surprise decision to join Renault for 2019, Gasly was already regarded by the team as his successor. Most assumed it would be Carlos Sainz Jr, an ostensibly logical move given he was under contract to Red Bull and a proven performer with four seasons of experience. But Red Bull was partly motivated by a desire to ensure a harmonious team.

While some might argue that it was really because Sainz had been shaded by Nico Hulkenberg at Renault, the risks of reuniting what had been a fractious Verstappen/Sainz pairing in their Toro Rosso days was real. Red Bull's management knows exactly how good Sainz is, and on performance he is capable of, at worst, scoring a lot of points and winning races in the right car. But it has also experienced the political problems through Toro Rosso from 2015 and early '16.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the two sides of that argument, Verstappen is the man in situ and likely champion in waiting. Hence, Sainz was frozen out. That decision was made more straightforward by the way Sainz forced his way into a loan to Renault in the first place. So, it's less to do with his performance in the car, and everything about outside factors.

Verstappen will shed no tears over Sainz's absence. While Verstappen was unquestionably the stronger driver when they were together at Toro Rosso, Sainz was closer than a glance at the results suggests. But Gasly is certainly preferable since, by all accounts, he and Verstappen already have a good relationship. Red Bull, by definition, must therefore believe that Gasly will fit in better than Sainz would have done alongside Verstappen. But it also knows Gasly is a very capable driver and hasn't picked him to trundle around half-a-second a lap slower than Verstappen.

Gasly will not go into the season planning to be disruptive, but this will be an unavoidable result if he achieves his own personal goals. He's a young driver determined to prove himself worthy of a top seat, and will be aiming to deliver a level of performance that can't fail to cause some friction with Verstappen.

Where Gasly really catches the eye is with his willingness to attack from the off without making mistakes as a consequence

"Max is one of the best drivers on the grid at the moment, and if you want to be the best, you need to fight against the best," Gasly says of his objective.

"With Max alongside me, of course it is going to be a tough season, but I really see it as an amazing opportunity for me to show what I can do."

If you want to show your potential, and like all F1 drivers Gasly believes that winning the world title is a realistic ambition for him long-term, you don't do that by being a good, well-behaved number two. And no driver in their first exposure to the competition at the front of F1 will accept that a title shot isn't in their future, especially before the reality of taking on a driver like Verstappen over a season sets in.

Gasly will look back at what Ricciardo did to Vettel back in 2014, or Verstappen himself did when he joined Red Bull during '16, for a model of how to make an impact. It's hard to see him beating Verstappen over a season on performance, as Ricciardo famously did to Vettel, but you don't need to do that to be a thorn in the side.

There is one prerequisite for doing this: serious pace. Gasly certainly has that, particularly when things are going well. In Bahrain and Hungary last year he was best of the rest, proving himself capable of nailing what might be termed race-winning performances in a midfield setting. He was also fast in Monaco, and he is rightly feted for his race performance there, taking seventh place following a disappointing run to 10th in Q3.

On the downside, Gasly's 2018 campaign was also uneven. This isn't unusual in a Toro Rosso team that has been an erratic F1 performer over the years. But it didn't have the consistent magic of what Verstappen did when he scored 13 points finishes in 23 starts there. Gasly's haul of five points returns in 21 starts last year falls short of that, although the high points were hugely impressive and he had to deal with more engine-related grid penalties.

The least favourable interpretation of Gasly's season was that it was mercurial, with some flashes of brilliance and some more mundane performances. But rookies, and Gasly is rightly regarded as a 2018 rookie despite his five late-season outings the year before, deserve a greater emphasis to be put on their peaks. As experience builds, the dots of those peaks of performance must be joined. That's one of the reasons I rated Gasly ninth in Autosport's top 10 F1 drivers of last season.

Where Gasly really catches the eye is with his willingness to attack from the off, without making mistakes as a consequence, even in a Toro Rosso that often wasn't the most stable at the rear. This makes him a joy to watch in opening practice on a Friday. It's a trait he shares with Verstappen, and one that should help him not lose ground in terms of performance to his team-mate early in the year. He's a confident character, one who won't be overawed by the big name Verstappen has become in the past couple of years.

Gasly has also proved he knows how to get a team behind him. He asserted himself over Brendon Hartley last season, and that was despite the fact the underlying pace gap between the two was far smaller than the massive points imbalance suggests. But Gasly was better at delivering when it really mattered, which translated into a scorecard 29-4 in his favour.

When Hartley, rightly or wrongly, launched some barbs at the team, Gasly was increasingly happy to give a withering look when asked about it to betray the fact he knew he was on completely safe ground and therefore unafraid to make his opinion known. Clearly he can hold his own in a politicised atmosphere, although that was one in which he held the balance of power on performance. Things could be very different for him at Red Bull, which is what makes his 2019 performance critical.

If there's a crunch point, it will be when the pair cross swords on track. Inevitably this will happen because Gasly is too fast not to sometimes find himself on the same piece of asphalt and on a similar strategy to Verstappen. Those intra-team scenarios didn't always end well for Red Bull in 2018, and while a repeat of the Azerbaijan catastrophe is at the extreme end of the spectrum for what could go wrong, a collision isn't out of the question.

But it could be something more mild - even a disagreement about team orders or, as in Austria last year, one driver getting frustrated by the running order in qualifying. It just needs to be something that raises Verstappen's hackles.

Gasly is fast enough at least to cause occasional problems to Verstappen. Even that might just be enough to have a big impact on the 2019 season

And history suggests that it's not too difficult to get under Verstappen's skin. His reaction to the Baku collision with Ricciardo last year was initially to bat away criticisms. At first he said emphatically that he didn't need to change anything when team principal Christian Horner's suggestion that it was necessary to do so was put to him in Canada. Admittedly, later in the season, Verstappen did accept that he had dialled back his approach, so perhaps he's learned his lesson there.

In his Toro Rosso days, he caused aggro by refusing to let Sainz past when ordered to do so by the team in Singapore in 2015, and problems also arose the following year in Australia when Sainz was running ahead.

In Mexico last year, where Verstappen missed pole position and team-mate Ricciardo nicked it, his reaction wasn't only about annoyance at the car not behaving as he wanted it to under braking. It shows how little he enjoys being beaten by a rival from his own team.

A lot of the time, it's less about outwardly obvious demonstrations of unhappiness, but more on politics behind the scenes for a driver who, quite justifiably, wants the full weight of a top team behind his prodigious ability.

Since Verstappen starts this season as the unquestioned top dog, rather than having to assert himself over a fellow rookie like Sainz or an established leader like Ricciardo, who knows how he will react to the threat of what he will see as an upstart like Gasly. That's a risk even if Verstappen is usually ahead and Gasly is just an occasional nuisance, let alone if a more sustained challenge arises.

A driver doesn't have to set out to be a problem to become a disruptive influence and Gasly isn't going to set out to be a problem. But if he delivers on his objective of showing he can be a true F1 ace, that could inevitably lead to problems for Red Bull to deal with.

To do that, he has to be fast - and consistently so. Can he be? That's the question every single driver on the grid is attempting to answer in the affirmative. Gasly might be able to pull it off. Certainly, he's fast enough at least to cause occasional problems for Verstappen. And that might just be enough to have a big impact on the 2019 season.