Last weekend in Barcelona, Alpine brought updates that seem to have given the A522 a boost. In free practice on Friday, the cars of Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon showed good pace, but on Saturday, the team experienced a difficult qualifying with the Frenchman twelfth and his two-time world champion seventeenth.
In the race, both drivers managed to recover. Ocon finished in seventh position while Alonso obtained ninth place. However, despite the difficulties experienced on Saturday, Ocon was pleased with the updates the team brought to the track.
“I’m confident we’re going in the right direction with the new things we’ve put into the car. It seems to work. Of course we know other teams are making progress too and that’s why we can’t let our guard down,” Ocon said.
“We have to bring other news. P7 is a good result, but it’s not where we want to be. We have to push hard to catch up with Alfa Romeo. We have a lot to see after this weekend.”
“We talk to each other a lot,” he added. “And we have collected some indications that we need to analyze, because at the moment it is difficult to understand everything with this totally new car. For us, however, this result is equivalent to a victory.”
In this way, Ocon focused on the data collected in the race and on the result of the strategy adopted by the team for him and for Alonso .
“Now we can also make a comparison between my data and Fernando’s, as he had new tires in the end. These are all positive elements.”
“I am very satisfied with the result of the race. I think that being able to score points with both cars despite the starting positions is an unexpected result, but the pace in the first part was fantastic,” he concluded.
