It's not clear to me, what you are asking. The most simple paradigmatic example of a gauge field is the electromagnetic field. The gauge group is U(1), and indeed you are right, gauge invariance is not a symmetry of physics, because it's rather a redundancy in describing a physical situation.
In electromagnetism that's pretty intuitive. In classical electromagnetism what's physically observable is the electromagneticmagnetic field, ##(\vec{E},\vec{B})##. It can, in principle, be determined by observing the motion of test charges in this field.
On the other hand the homogeneous Maxwell equations, which mathematically are constraint equations on ##(\vec{E},\vec{B})## can be fulfilled identically by introducing a scalar and a vector potential,
$$\vec{E}=-\partial_t \vec{A} - \vec{\nabla} \Phi, \quad \vec{B}=\vec{\nabla} \times \vec{A},$$
but for a given physical situation, i.e., for a given physical field ##(\vec{E},\vec{B})## the potentials are not uniquely determined, because you can always introduce new potentials by a "gauge transformation",
$$\vec{A}'=\vec{A} -\vec{\nabla} \chi, \quad \Phi'=\Phi+\partial_t \chi,$$
because then
$$-\partial_t \vec{A}'-\vec{\nabla} \Phi'=-\partial_t \vec{A}'+\partial_t \vec{\nabla} \chi - \vec{\nabla} \Phi - \vec{\nabla} \partial_t \chi=-\partial_t \vec{A}-\vec{\nabla} \Phi=\vec{E}$$
and
$$\vec{\nabla} \times \vec{A}'=\vec{\nabla} \times \vec{A} - \vec{\nabla} \times \vec{\nabla} \Phi=\vec{\nabla} \times \vec{A}=\vec{B},$$
i.e., the physical situation is not uniquely described by the potentials ##(\Phi,\vec{A})## but by "##(\Phi,\vec{A})## modulo an arbitrary gauge transformation".
When quantizing a gauge-field theory you run into characteristic problems due to this "gauge freedom", and indeed for the electromagnetic field a naive particle picture is even less useful than when quantizing massive fields. To understand this, it's useful to remember the origin of the fields to describe representations of the Poincare group, and it turns out that for massless fields the entire business changes compared to the case of massive fields. Indeed, the notion of massless and massive fields of course also originates from the representation theory of the Poincare group since mass from this point of view is a Casimir operator of the corresponding Lie algebra, given by ##P_{\mu} P^{\mu}=m^2 c^2##, where ##P_{\mu}## (the "four-momentum operators") are the generators of space-time translations.
It turns out that in the case of massless fields you don't have spin in the usual sense but only "helicity", i.e., the projection of the total angular momentum to the direction of momentum, and for massless particles of "spin" ##s## you don't have ##(2s+1)## values for a spin component (corresponding to ##(2s+1)## field degrees of freedom) but only two helicity values ##\pm s##. For photons, i.e., the quanta of the em. field, you have only the two helicities ##\pm 1##, corresponding to left- and right-circular polarized field modes instead of three spin-degrees of freedom as you get for massive spin-1 fields.
This also indicates that you cannot describe a massless spin-1 field in a naive way by "wave functions". If you try to realize them with local field equations of motion, as needed to implement the microcausality constraint on the quantized theory, you are let necessarily to the description by a gauge theory as in classical electrodynamics.
For the details on the representation theory of the Poincare group, see
R. U. Sexl and H. K. Urbantke, Relativity, Groups, Particles, Springer, Wien (2001).