Esteban Ocon Emulates the All-Time Record of Former F1 Veteran With His Bahrain Nightmare

Only a five-second penalty for Esteban Ocon? No, top that with a few more. The veteran at the French outfit, Alpine, had a race to forget last Sunday at Bahrain. The penalty curse began that began with Pierre Gasly during qualifying snowballed into the worst luck for his teammate, only figuratively, of course. Interestingly, the sanction streak saw Esteban Ocon equal a record in F1, just not a desirable one.

Pastor Maldonado was a driver for Lotus in 2015. It was during that season’s Hungarian Grand Prix (ironically the same venue where Ocon became a race winner) that Maldonado was handed three penalties over the course of a single race. A record that stood tall in shame all these years was matched when Esteban Ocon was given a triple stack of penalties during the Bahrain Grand Prix. It began with him parking incorrectly on the grid and the rest followed as a butterfly effect of incorrectly serving the first penalty or being 0.1 KMPH over the speed limit in the pitlane, arguably due to frustration.

As quoted by Crashnet, Ocon said, “We were too forward on the grid spot – it was very clear. I don’t want to go into details, but usually we are very good on all these operational things.”

Still in disbelief of how the penalty saga began, he added, “What we’ve done today, we’ve done it the same way I’ve done the last five years, but today it has been different. We need to analyse, we need to see what happened, and opinion,come back stronger from it.”

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While the driver was annoyed and still in disbelief over the decisions of the stewards, Otmar Szafnauer, though of the same opinion, took a route suited to the role of TP.

Otmar Szafnauer shared his two cents on the Esteban Ocon incident

While Ocon and Otmar Szafnauer both were of the opinion that an outfit like Alpine would never commit an amateur error like parking in the grid box incorrectly, the latter is also certain that “The system started the countdown 0.4 seconds early” which resulted in a subsequent penalty as the FIA stewards thought that the preceding penalty wasn’t served properly. However, for the “record-breaking” third penalty, Otmar, who had already dealt with Gasly being fined 100 euros for being 0.4 KMPH over the speed limit, says it is on the driver to learn from it.

Summarizing the situation Otmar said, “Esteban being out of position at the start, he’ll learn from that. It’s very, very rare for this team to make those types of operations mistakes, like starting early on working on the car. I’ve never seen it happen here before.”

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What are your thoughts on the nightmare that Esteban Ocon faced during the Bahrain Grand Prix? Let us know in the comments below.