F1 Australian GP: Pierre Gasly “not leaving me enough space” caused ‘ugly’ restart collision, declares Esteban Ocon

Esteban Ocon's take on his and Pierre Gasly's collision at the 2023 Australian GP.

F1 Australian GP: Pierre Gasly “not leaving me enough space” caused ‘ugly’ restart collision, declares Esteban Ocon

Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly

Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly had an outing to forget at the 2023 Australian GP. The Alpine duo was looking good to have a P5 and P10 finish at the event, but chaos ensued between the two Alpine drivers on the second restart of the race. Ocon and Gasly ended up knocking each other out of the event, and the former has revealed that Pierre Gasly apologized to him after the race.

Esteban Ocon was running in P10 during the second restart, with only one lap remaining of the Grand Prix. However, Gasly locked up going into Turn1 and was immediately overtaken by a number of cars. While things were okay up to this point, things went haywire for the Alpine duo, when Gasly did not check his mirrors and emerged in front of Ocon out of nowhere.

That led to the two colliding and bringing an abrupt halt to their respective outings. While shedding light on the chaos after the race, Ocon added, “I am feeling okay, but a slight headache. It was a hard hit. I am okay… I am tougher than that. I will survive. It was a tough weekend, nothing really clicked on our side. The things that were out of our control really. We had a good pace. I think we were similar in pace to the Astons and Ferraris.”

“So, we could have been much higher up. We were racing on our own passing some cars and it could have been a good race. That red flag killed our strategy, we were going to be fourth or fifth without the red flag. That red flag killed it completely. Then we had the chaotic restart. It could have been anyone that I collided with because there were a lot of cars going off. It ended up being Pierre not leaving me enough space, but no hard feelings. He came and apologized.”

Looking at the Frenchman’s reaction, it is clear that he expected to come away with a decent hall of points from Albert Park, Esteban Ocon is disappointed with how things panned out for him and Pierre Gasly at the event. He deems all the chaos as something not really in anyone’s control. Moreover, has also admitted that his teammate knew that he was at fault for causing the collision, and thus, Gasly approached him after the race and sincerely apologized for what happened.

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Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have cost Alpine dearly in the Constructors standings

Alpine F1
Alpine F1

Coming into the 2023 Australian GP, Alpine was ahead of the midfield teams comfortably, but after the recently concluded race, the Enstone-based Alpine is now sixth in the Constructors standings behind the McLaren F1 team. This is extremely disappointing for the French team considering, McLaren does not have a strong race car this year.

After three races in the ongoing season, Alpine is stuck on 8 points, whereas the Woking-based team has now leapfrogged them and has got 12 points to its name. While Esteban and Pierre have returned with a DNF from Albert Park, McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri landed their respective cars in a respectable P6 and P8 on the final standings.

Considering everything, the Alpine F1 team is surely going to have a long discussion as to what happened and look for answers from its drivers. Wrecking one car is costly enough in F1, but wrecking two cars leads to an extremely hefty amount of money to be splashed on the repair work. However, the only good thing to come out of Albert Park for Alpine is that the next race is quite a few weeks away.

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