Ocon rallied from 16th on the grid to finish seventh at the Belgian Grand Prix, calling Alpine’s performance “our best weekend of the year so far, and probably the best since joining the team”.
The key to the Frenchman’s comeback was the Alpine car’s impressive straight-line speed, which also allowed Fernando Alonso to battle at the front in the opening stage of the race and ultimately finish fifth.
Ocon pulled off two double passes during his display, the first on lap 15 when he passed Daniel Ricciardo and Nicholas Latifi under braking for the Bus Stop chicane .
But it was the second that really got the paddock talking, when he passed Sebastian Vettel and Pierre Gasly at the end of the Kemmel Straight .
As Vettel walked down the center of the track as Gasly and Ocon passed him on either side of him, the action was compared to Mika Hakkinen passing Michael Schumacher in a similar fashion at Spa in 2000, using the lapped Ricardo Zonta in the center of the trajectory as a hook.
(Watch the video of Hakkinen and Ocon’s double overtaking below, and click on the link if it doesn’t appear)
Esteban Ocon began to plot the play coming out of La Source , noting that Vettel had overtaken Gasly too early and would run out of DRS down the long straight.
He then used the tactic of lifting a bit on the way to Eau Rouge to create some gap, allowing him to maximize the slingshot at the top of the hill coming out of Raidillon before slipstreaming both cars.
“I was kind of thinking that Sebastian [Vettel] had passed Pierre [Gasly] too early, because he wasn’t going to have the DRS!” Ocon explained.
“From there, I lifted the throttle a little bit, made a little bit of a gap to be able to use straightline speed. And then the surprise and confirmation was that Pierre had DRS.”
“I was able to go on the left side. Seb was very fair, he could have closed a bit on the left but he didn’t, and I managed to pass Pierre on the outside of Turn 5.”
Vettel said he was “fighting without weapons” given the lack of DRS, which left him powerless to try to stop Ocon.
Ocon laughed when asked if he had seen any of Hakkinen’s videos recently, but revealed that he had in fact spoken to the Finn ex-McLaren before the race.
“Mika [Hakkinen] came to talk to me before the race in the paddock too! It’s a good coincidence,” said Ocon, who realized the similarity of both movements after the Belgian appointment.
“It was definitely a lot of fun. I enjoyed the race, the car was extremely fast on the straight so I was managing the moment of overtaking well.”
“From where we started, I think 16th or 17th, I think we expected a point and in fact we got six. So it’s clearly a good result for us.”
