Ocon Blames His Alpine F1 Car for the Pace Deficit to Alonso

Esteban Ocon enjoyed a much better start to the 2021 F1 campaign with Alpine compared to his teammate, Fernando Alonso. However, as the season progressed, tables turned quite dramatically, with the Frenchman being no match to the two-time world champion’s pace.

Alonso secured his fourth consecutive top 10 finish at the Austrian Grand Prix, gaining a healthy 15 points out of the four weekends. On the other hand, Ocon’s non-scoring streak went up to four with the race weekend in Austria.

Contrasting, isn’t it?

Well, Ocon is quite adamant that the pace deficit has something to do with his car, and reckoned he will have a talk with the Alpine crew in a bit to retrieve that ‘missing pace.’

What did the Alpine F1 driver say?

As reported by The Race, Ocon finds the difference gap to Alonso unbelievable, especially since he held the upper hand until almost round 5 of the 2021 season.

“That difference is just too big. So there is definitely something that is not working properly. And we need to understand what that is,” Ocon said.

After a disappointing start in Bahrain, Ocon managed to bring the best out of the Alpine to carry them into the top 10 until the Monaco GP. By that time, the Frenchman then had garnered 12 points as opposed to Alonso’s five.

Unfortunately, then began the horror show for Ocon. While he suffered DNFs at Baku and Spielberg, he failed to make it to the top 10 over the other two races – France and Styria.

Don’t want to make other teams wiser: Esteban Ocon

Ocon reckoned that Alpine is lacking place, and quite stubborn that none of the rival teams made any significant leap in performance.

He said it is “difficult to put your finger on the sore spot. Because we don’t want to make other teams any wiser. We do see some things where there is a difference.”

“I don’t know exactly what all, but as much as possible. I’m going to talk to the team about it and then we’ll do everything we can. The more new parts, the more we can exclude,” Ocon added.

Overall, this isn’t the kind of performance Alpine would be hoping to see from Ocon, who had just signed a mammoth three-contract extension with the team.

Hence, the French lad will be looking to figure out what’s going wrong and come back stronger for the British Grand Prix. So, can Ocon manage to defeat his in-form F1 teammate, Alonso over the upcoming race weekend?

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