24/07/2023
NEWS STORY
Alpine has revealed that Esteban Ocon's seat was broken in the first corner clash that saw both cars eliminated.
It was the second successive race in which neither of the French team's two drivers saw the flag.
Starting 12th (Ocon) and 15th (Gasly) having been among those caught out by the revised qualifying format, the pair were innocent victims of the incident which saw Guanyu Zhou lock-up after suffering a glitch at the start.
In his desperation to make up the places lost, the Chinese driver carried too much speed into Turn 1 and locked-up sending him careering into Daniel Ricciardo who duly hit Ocon sending him high into the air before hitting teammate Gasly.
Gasly headed back to the pits to retire while teammate Ocon joined him a lap later.
It was subsequently revealed that in the incident Ocon's seat was broken in two places.
"We just suffered a strike into Turn 1," he said. "It's just a mistake from Zhou in the back. That led us to a massive hit. I took off by, I don't know, three metres, four metres on the rear wheels. When I landed, there was a big hit. My seat broke in pieces, in two parts. So that tells how much the impact was.
"I just literally just completely dropped in the car," he continued. "I thought that it was the rear suspension that we had broken, because the car was handling terribly, obviously, after that much damage. But no, it was actually the seat that broke, which changed my sitting position.
"Unfortunately, both cars were out after that," he added. "Those are the consequences from racing at the back. People tend to take more risk. We knew it and we suffered from it today. We're going to be racing next week and that's the good thing because we can forget quickly this weekend."
"It's extremely frustrating for the team to lose both cars straight into Turn 1," added teammate Gasly. "We just don't seem to catch a break at the moment. Every weekend we seem to have some unfortunate scenarios like that. I hope we can get away from that sort of spiral quite quickly."
While Zhou received a 5s time penalty for causing the incident that did little to ease Alpine's pain, especially as a 1-5 finish for McLaren allowed the Woking outfit to move 40 points clear.
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