Pierre Gasly has admitted he was "kind of angry" after hearing of Red Bull's decision to demote him midway through 2019.

The Frenchman was thurst into the spotlight alongside Max Verstappen this season after Daniel Ricciardo's move to Renault but failed to deliver the goods and was ultimately replaced during the summer break.

Since then he has taken a largely pragmatic view, but speaking in Abu Dhabi, finally let his true feelings be known on what happened.

“Of course when I got the news I was really shocked and kind of angry,” Gasly told Motorsport Week. “I don’t feel it was fair because these first six months were nowhere near what we should have shown.

“You do care because you want to be in the fastest car and I’ve tried to make changes in my way, and I’ve been promised things that in the end didn’t happen. There were many things that didn’t go in the right way.

“But at the end of the day this was the situation, it was done, it was passed, I couldn’t change it.”

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Once back at Toro Rosso though, his results actually largely matched what he was achieving at Red Bull but were obviously more notable in a slower car.

“I thought, okay, I have these nine races where I’m going to show my skills, my speed, my consistency, the things I’ve shown since I started single-seaters until I got to Red Bull," he explained on his approach post-Spa.

“I’ve been fast in every season in every car in every different category and these six months [were the] only six months of my career where things didn’t go right.

“Suddenly everyone questions ‘ah does he know how to brake, does he know how to turn the wheel’ and all these things, and all these silly things that comment because the information stays confidential within the team.

“It was like, okay, now I’m going to work harder than ever to prove this point and for these nine races I want to be at the best level ever without changing anything, still keeping the same approach I had at the beginning of the year, but just making sure I’m on top of the game every session.”

Of course, his moment of satisfaction came at Interlagos where he capitalised on the late drama to finish second, out-dragging Lewis Hamilton to the line.

But the Red Bull/Toro Rosso drama was only part of what he admits was a "rollercoaster" year.

“I was with some friends and they were like ‘your year has been like a Hollywood movie, a movie you think it can’t be true, there are too many things that happened to be true’,” he smiled.

“And that’s a bit the way I feel it as well.

“I just went through all sorts of emotions and feelings, from frustration to anger, to one of the saddest moments of my life at Spa with Anthoine [Hubert] and then two months later to one of the happiest moments of my life with the first podium in F1.

“It’s just like such a rollercoaster but at the same time, I’ve learned a lot from these situations on a personal level but also as a driver.

“In the end it was only my second season in F1 so there’s still a lot of things you discover and experience.”