Alpine had a nightmare F1 Italian GP where both Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon expected pain but not to the extent they did.
Having had a couple of strong races ahead of F1 Italian GP, the Alpine pair of Gasly and Ocon expected pain at Monza considering their package and the nature of the circuit. But how the weekend panned out eventually, they didn’t expect to this extent.
Both of them were knocked out in Q1 and ran mostly outside the Top 10. While Gasly finished in 15th, Ocon was forced to retire due to steering wheel issue. The Alpine drivers were naturally not too pleased with how things panned out.
The power unit deficiency is talked about but in general, the car too lacked performance and pace at Monza which is a bigger talking point as per the drivers. “It’s been super painful,” said Gasly to media. “I don’t think we have ever had such a lack of competitiveness compared to our rivals.
“We knew straight away from the start of the season that it would be a painful one. But yeah, it was clearly very difficult out there. The most important thing is really to understand and quantify where that drop of performance is coming from and come back next year with a stronger package.
“Because I’m going past Carlos last week on track, same tyres, on pure pace, and this weekend he’s standing on the podium, and I’m almost a lap down. We knew it’s a very power-sensitive track, but still, it seems like it’s not only [that], it’s the whole package, which has got to be better for this track,” summed up Gasly.
At the same time, Ocon added: “For safety reasons, I retired. We had the steering locking into corners and we didn’t want the steering to lock completely. So, it was just safer to retire the car and not have more issues. That ended our weekend which has been a tough one. I’ve had the worst ones in the past.
“It’s not because we have a bad weekend, that we are going to give up. I think it’s a good weekend in terms of learning and looking at the difficulties that we had. There’s going to be plenty of analysis and we have a week when we’re not racing, so we can focus exactly on what went wrong and come back from in Singapore.”
Here’s George Russell on contact with Esteban Ocon