06/03/2023
NEWS STORY
Rather than his new teammate, Pierre Gasly, it was the Sakhir stewards who caused Esteban Ocon grief on Sunday afternoon.
Penalised for an "inaccurate start position", the Frenchman was handed a 5s penalty.
All well and good one might think.
However, following his stop to serve the penalty the stewards reviewed video evidence and noted that when Ocon came into the pit lane and stopped to
serve the penalty, after 4.6 seconds a mechanic started working on the car, which is a breach of the regulations.
Noting that this was not significant enough to warrant disqualification they still hit Ocon with another penalty, this time a 10s stop.
All well and good one might think.
Unfortunately, when serving the penalty, having exceeded the pit lane speed limit, which was set at 80 km/h for this event, by 0.1 km/h, the Alpine driver was hit with another 5 second time penalty.
While we tweeted that Ocon was in danger of being penalised for the crime of being French, his team opted to retire the car feeling it was pointless - no pun intended - to continue.
"Quite impressive how it was not our day today," he told reporters. "We are usually quite good on these operational things, pit stopping, stopping at the right places, and these are things that we put a lot of effort on, so everything went wrong today for sure.
"It has never gone like that in the past, ever," he continued, "so I'm a bit surprised to see that this happened. But we will analyse and come back stronger from it."
Referring to the original penalty, he claims that four other drivers were similarly out of position.
"Four other cars were also out of place ahead," he said. "I was not the only one out of the line. I was the most forward, that's clear, but not the only one. So that's frustrating."
"It's a tough one to swallow," he admitted, "because we were on for points. The positive to come out of it, is we had the pace to be there, in the last stint I was pretty much as fast as Carlos, so that was very positive.
"I was in the points all the way until I got the penalty, so it's clear we've got the pace to be up there. Not exactly where we want to be, but to score points on merit."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Manama here.