Esteban Ocon pleased to score in F1 Belgian GP even though he expected slightly more, but Pierre Gasly was frustrated after more troubles.
Despite being one of the slowest cars on the grid and going through lots of changes, Alpine had another point scoring finish ahead of some faster rivals in F1 Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps. Their 10th place finish for Ocon turned into ninth after the race.
During it, Ocon was running around the Top 10 and in fact, he was ahead of Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso for a good part until the Spaniard opted for one-stop which helped him to remain in front of him courtesy of an unexpected lower rate of degradation.
But Ocon was pleased with the outcome where he had decent pace to hang on inside the Top 10. Even though he missed out on getting Alonso, he thought the safe approach of two-stop was the right as per the numbers, but the team had to be a little more proactive.
“Everytime I wear the Deadpool helmet in the race, I get decent result,” joked Ocon to media. “Obviously here in Belgium it is not P4 like Las Vegas but we still take it. It was a positive race, the car performance has been very decent in this race, we were able to fight cars to progress throughout the race.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t maximum result as before the last stop we were 4-6s in front of Fernando and unfortunately, he finished 2-3s in front of us, so that last stop cost us a lot unfortunately. It was very clear that we had to react with the numbers we were going to have in the race.
“We had to be flexible with the plan. It was clear that this is what we have to do, we decided to do the safe plan that we usually do, unfortunately, it wasn’t the right one to go,” summed up Ocon, who teammate Pierre Gasly faced another engine issue during the grand prix which held him back to fight for points.
“It was suppose to be couple of kph but I ended up losing seven tenths every lap with the engine temperature issue, it was just very frustrating, keep adding problems on top of problems,” said Gasly. “The engine was completely not optimal, we need to check with the guys why we struggle so much.
“We had a plan but we need to review why we haven’t picked up the right one against any of the car, we were the only to have done that, but yeah, clearly something we need to improve. The set-up of the last few weekends were bent, picked up the wrong strategy, we just are making way too many mistakes as a team. It has been a tough start of the season but we scored good points in the first part of the year, we must do a lot better in the second part of the year.”
Here’s Alpine news on Bruno Famin’s exit as team principal
Here’s how F1 Belgian GP panned out
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