“It’s a really tight pit-lane but we’ll be looking at exactly what happened” – Esteban Ocon

It was a disappointing Emilia Romagna Grand Prix for the Alpine F1 Team, with Esteban Ocon finishing fourteenth and Fernando Alonso retiring early-on at the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari.

Ocon had been running close to the points for almost the entire race, the Frenchman occupied eleventh-place for the majority of last Sunday. Ocon did actually cross the line in eleventh, but was demoted to fourteenth after being awarded a five-second penalty for an unsafe release earlier in the race.

The French driver was frustrated with how the race panned out, and wants to find out exactly how his pit-lane incident happened. Ocon will be hoping for better luck at the next round.

“It was a frustrating race for us in the end where we’ve not scored any points. For me, it’s been a tricky one since the beginning and the Qualifying result compromised the rest of my weekend so if you think about it, where we ended up today before the penalty is not too bad. We lacked a bit of race pace and in the end we were not quick enough to get into the points even without the five second penalty.

“It’s a really tight pit-lane but we’ll be looking at exactly what happened in the debrief tonight to see if it could’ve been avoided. We’ll learn and move on from this one, and I’m already looking forward to Miami.”

“There was a lot of damage on the right-side of my floor” – Fernando Alonso

Fernando Alonso’ race was short-lived, the Spaniard made an excellent start in the top ten but was then hit on his right-side by Mick Schumacher.

The damage Alonso suffered was quite extensive, with a massive hole being visible on his right side-pod. It wasn’t long after the collision that Alpine made the decision to retire the Spaniard from the race.

Alonso was disappointed with his race’s outcome, as his run of bad luck continues.

“It was another unfortunate race for us this season. We made a decent start and moved up to eighth but there was a lot of damage on the right side of my floor and on the sidepod, so we had no choice but to retire. It’s unlucky as a small brush with Mick [Schumacher], which wasn’t intentional, destroyed our car and race. After Australia I feel that I could have scored 20 or 30 points in the championship, and I have only two. It’s unlucky! It’s a long season and there are plenty of points still to score.”