For many young drivers hoping to ride a moneyed wave of high-energy carbonated beverage to the peak of motor racing, the Red Bull Junior Team has proved to be a ghastly business. Now, indubitably, it's Pierre Gasly's business, for he is the latest young talent to be thrust onto the Formula 1 stage by this most demanding of up-or-out mechanisms - presided over, as ever, by Red Bull driver consultant, former F1 driver Helmut Marko.

Students of history would determine that the signs aren't good: in over a decade of separating the wheat from the chaff, the Red Bull Junior Team has groomed just one world champion. The road towards, through and beyond Sebastian Vettel's four world titles is littered with the career wreckage of also-rans who were merely quite good. Viewed through Marko's merciless prism, adequacy equates to inadequacy.

"The main things are to show speed, good racing, consistency, and be there when there are chances for points" Pierre Gasly

But while Gasly arrives with a spring in his step and a grin on his face - like some but not all of his predecessors - he's not attended by the miasma of entitlement that several of them exhibited. And when F1 Racing broaches the question of whether Marko has sat him down with a list of must-must-must benchmarks to hit, he doesn't equivocate about where his priorities lie, or what motivates him.