Lewis Hamilton and Esteban Ocon plan to do undertake another RC Cars competition in future after doing so in F1 Japanese GP weekend.
Ahead of the F1 Japanese GP weekend, Mercedes’ Hamilton and Alpine’s Ocon surprised fans with a little RC Cars competition in the pitlane on Thursday. The duo had planned to do so a while ago and finally executed the same in Suzuka.
Both Hamilton and Ocon are fans of RC Cars action where the latter does more of it during his off time than the former. They wish to do it more often against each other and they could possibly do so in Austin during the US GP weekend.
Here’s what they said about their Suzuka run –
Hamilton: “Yeah, so Esteban and I had planned while ago, that while we’re here, we’ll get our remote control cars together and have a bit of a race in the pit lane. For me, it was very reminiscent of when I was a kid on Blue Peter, and it was really cool, because we all share, more in common than we probably think, other than the fact that we’re pure racers. But it’s very rare that we all get to do things like that, so it was it was fun. They were run on petrol but I thought they were going to be electric. That’s what our race when I was a kid. I raced electric and petrol and it was Kyosho. It’s basically an evolution of the car that you’ll see, like Senna had and I had the same car as Senna when I was younger. And he’s mega at it.”
Ocon: “It was just a bit of fun.”
Hamilton: “We were all spinning around – but I wasn’t far off your pace!”
Ocon: “I was super-impressed, because he hasn’t done it for years. And he was like: ‘yeah, start slow,” and all that. Because I practice a lot, like I’m constantly on it, and straight away, like first braking points, he nails it. So, you know, that’s more than impressive.”
Hamilton: “I flipped it a lot of times! But I think I had a softer set-up.”
Ocon: “Yeah, he had a softer set-up.”
Here’s some videos:
https://x.com/OconEsteban/status/1704801871670464611?s=20
https://x.com/MercedesAMGF1/status/1704861757347446862?s=20
Here’s Mercedes crediting Frederik Vesti
Here’s Mercedes camp on team orders, strategy
Here’s Alpine pair on team orders in Suzuka