Alpine trio reflect on the Lap 1 incident which caused a double DNF in F1 Hunagrian GP – their second on the bounce after British GP.
The two races where McLaren gained the most in the F1 standings when Alpine lost it all with double DNF in both British GP and Hungarian GP. In Silverstone, they retired after laps done but in Hungaroring it was an early end on Lap 1 after an incident.
Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu had a slow start and he out-braked into Turn 1 hitting AlphaTauri’s Daniel Ricciardo who in turn hit Alpine’s Esteban Ocon where he then collided with teammate Pierre Gasly. Both did manage to continue on.
However, when Gasly pitted without a tyre on his wheel and rear wing damage, he retired. Ocon did a couple of laps and eventually was asked to retire due to damage. The latter had a broken seat after the airborne moment which ended his race much to the disappoint.
Ocon: “Not much to really comment on, unfortunately, we just suffered a strike into Turn 1. It was just a mistake from Zhou in the back and that lead us to a massive hit. I took off by three or four metres on the rear wheels and, when I landed, there was a big hit. My seat broke in pieces, in two parts, so that will tell how much the impact was. Unfortunately, both cars were out after that. Those are the consequences from racing in the back – people tend to take more risks. We knew it, and we suffered from it today. So we’re going to be racing again next week and that’s the good thing that we can forget this weekend quickly. So far, I’m still warm so it’s OK. I’m lucky enough to be with a team of very professional people and I should be well taken care of.”
Gasly: “A double DNF is a big shame. After that start I already gained a place obviously from Zhou and I was probably going to go around the outside of whoever it was on the inside but I was probably going to be P10 already so there was some good prospects. But this will have to be done next week. We are lucky enough to be racing and forget that one quite quickly. On my side I took a really good start, we knew it was the target with the soft tyre. I managed to get off the line very well, positioned myself well into turn one, braked late, make already a couple of positions. From what I saw and heard Zhou touched Daniel who touched Esteban and then Esteban ended up on top of my car. So it’s just very unfortunate. We just don’t seem to catch a break at the moment. Every weekend we seem to have some unfortunate scenarios like that and I hope we can get away from this sort of spiral quite quickly and just get a clean run, especially for next weekend before the summer break.”
Szafnauer: “Definitely not the weekend we were after. We struggled a bit on the medium tyres in qualifying and we were much more used to the softs running in Q2 and we are actually pretty good on the softs when we ran them in FP3 and FP2. FP2 everyone ran softs and we were third and fifth but we just couldn’t get the mediums working properly. Anyway, therefore we started 12th and 15th and when you start in the midfield like that you saw what could happen. There was nothing we could do. It was Zhou into Ricciardo into Esteban into Pierre. Like bowling. It is funny you ask about such incidents and morale because I went around the garage and told all the boys and girls here that just keep doing what we are doing and keep focused on the things we have control over. The other things will eventually come.
“We didn’t have control over the two DNFs today, we really didn’t have control over the DNFs in Silverstone, one was a pump failure from a manufacturer that makes pumps for helicopters and airlines, they are an aerospace company that rarely has failures. It just happened to fail. And then the other one was a safety car issue, so you cannot predict those things. So don’t worry about those things, focus on what we can control, and do a good job there. I’m going to do the same on Monday.”
Here’s the incident involving Alpine: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2023-hungarian-grand-prix-nightmare-start-for-alpine-as-ocon-and-gasly-dnf-after-contact-on-lap-1.1772220185554398592.html
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out