Alpine arrived in Australia ready to tackle the weekend and hoping to come out of the race in the best possible way. It was not the case for Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon.
For most of Sunday afternoon in Melbourne, things looked great for the Enstone-based team. Gasly was running a superb P5 and kept Carlos Sainz in his sights throughout the day. Ocon was P9 and heading for solid points. Then it all went wrong following a red flag for Magnussen’s crash.
On the second restart of the race, the situation escalated with a big accident between the two drivers on the exit of turn 2.
“Well, they each apologised, so they each thought they played a role in it,” stated Szafnauer in his post-race media session.“It was just chaos out there. had Pierre not gone wide in Turn 1 – but a lot of people did – then I think he would have been further up the road.”
“Esteban at the same time just followed Tsunoda through on the racing line and Pierre didn’t see him and came over to the racing line and just hit him. Which is… unfortunate.
“When we told him to push and keep up with [Carlos] Sainz he was able to, he wasn’t quite as quick as Sainz but not far off and the end we told him to push and make sure he stayed ahead of [Lance] Stroll and that he could do. The pace was really good here.”
As would you expect, Szafnauer toed the diplomatic line and refused to blame either driver for what happened.
“It’s a shame that they came together. As far as trying to blame one or the other, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do; the right thing to do is to learn from it. There’s so much chaos there and you’ve got to make quick decisions.
“If you look at the onboard and the replay, Tsunoda gets through, Esteban [Ocon] tries to follow him. You don’t know what Pierre’s going to do and Pierre’s just trying to get back to the racing line, it’s not like he’s looking in the mirrors and seeing somebody and saying ‘oh I’m going to block him’, he’s looking the other way, getting on the racing line thinking no one is there.
“It was truly a racing incident. Who’s to blame for something like that? Hindsight you look back at it and say great, shouldn’t have crashed but there are times you can’t avoid it, things happen in front of you where you have a decision of ‘I either run into this or run into that’ because you can’t avoid it.”
Instead of gaining on their midfield competitors in the Constructors’ Championship, the team left Australia with a big incident between their two drivers, a large repair bill, and no extra points. They also dropped to P6 in the standings behind 2022 rivals McLaren.
There is one person who probably left with a small sigh of relief and that is Pierre Gasly, who is still at risk of a race ban because of the accumulated points on his licence.
Photo credit: BWT Alpine F1 Team
