Alpine pair of Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon play down their F1 Australian GP contact as a freak incident with no hard feelings.
It was looking mighty for Alpine in F1 Australian GP especially Gasly who ran in the Top 5 for most part of the grand prix. His teammate Ocon struggled a bit compared to him, but there was a chance to score with the red flags thrown for incidents.
That was their undoing eventually as the re-start turned out to be a disaster for them. Gasly was forced off to avoid a spinning Fernando Alonso and while rejoining the track, he seemingly didn’t spot Ocon on his right nearing him.
Their wheels touched and sent them into the wall ending their races in a big disappointment causing another red flag. The incident was investigated but the Alpine pair were cleared, which was a sigh of relief for Gasly who is on the brink of a ban.
“I mean for now I’m just extremely disappointed with the outcome of the race,” said Gasly. “I gave everything out there… I don’t even want to comment about the ending. We remember what happened before. I’m just gutted to miss out on a strong result and we will have a couple of weeks to look back at these last two laps.
“I was pretty much in the gearbox of Carlos for quite many laps, and I was catching Fernando. I think at the end there they picked up a bit more pace. All in all, I don’t feel like we’ve missed much to be fighting with them properly. We were both 30 laps and I had Fernando in my sights.
“I was kind of hoping that we could pick up a bit of pace towards the end. It came a bit unexpected, but I felt comfortable in the car and that’s clearly giving us some good direction for the future with the team on what we need, and just giving some extra motivation for the coming races that we’ve got the pace to be fighting up there,” summed up Gasly as his Alpine teammate Ocon had no hard feelings against him.
“Obviously, Pierre came back off the track to on the track and left me no room and we collided, but no hard feelings,” said Ocon. “It could have been anyone and he came and apologised so it’s all good on that side. It’s just that yeah, it never seemed to tick on our way this weekend.
“The rest of the weekend, the rest of the race, how much positives there was in that race and looking at the pace, what’s crazy is that I’ve never had a weekend like this where it never clicks, the result in your direction. The pace was good, the pace was strong, and we were as fast as the Astons and the Ferrari in front.
“So it’s difficult to digest and obviously that last restart, a very chaotic start, a lot of cars off the track. Overtaking around the outside against those cars that had DRS in front, it was not like cars that were without defence. We were not far off Sergio at the time in terms of pace and that was pretty good, so we keep that in mind and hopefully come back stronger next [race],” summed up Ocon.
Here’s what happened at re-start: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2023-australian-grand-prix-chaos-and-multiple-crashes-on-second-restart-sees-race-immediately-stopped-again.1762048506170535189.html
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