Esteban Ocon has criticised Max Verstappen for the unnecessary incident that saw the Alpine driver be eliminated from Q1 in qualifying for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
After encountering traffic on his previous run, Ocon required an improvement upon his best time to ensure he could safely progress through to the second qualifying segment.
But having been caught up in a queue of cars at the end of the lap, Ocon opted to overtake Verstappen before the Dutchman proceeded to mount a lunge up the inside of Turn 1.
Ocon was unable to claw back the lost time from his compromised first sector, eventually costing him a place in Q2 and leaving him 17th on the grid for tomorrow night’s race.
“Yeah, it’s not only Las Vegas, it’s the whole season. I don’t seem to catch a break the whole time,” Ocon lamented. “It doesn’t matter what there is, it’s always for us. If it’s incidents, if it’s problems or whatever, it hurts us all the time.
“The first lap I got traffic in the worst possible sector in the last corner and from Turn 7 to 9. So lost some time, you know, that first lap. And then on the last lap, obviously we saw what happened. Lost a good seven-and-a-half tenths or something in Turn 1 and almost did improve by the end.
“So yeah, it was easily going to be through for us. I think the pace of the car looked promising. And hopefully we can use that tomorrow in the race to catch back up through the field.”
The Frenchman laid the blame entirely at Verstappen’s door, citing that the pace of the Red Bull meant the World Champion could have afforded to bail on his second run.
“The difference between me and him is that I have to do that lap because I had traffic in that first lap. And if I don’t do the second one, I’m out,” Ocon explained. “He has plenty of pace. So he can afford not to do his second lap.”
Ocon also pointed out that he was wary of falling foul of not respecting the maximum lap time rule, which he was penalised for last time out in Brazil with a three-place drop.
“But we were not respecting the delta. So we had to go for the lap,” he continued. “Plus on the delta, there were three cars queueing. We had to go. We were going to be illegal and I already got penalized last race for one of these things. So it couldn’t happen again.
“So I had no choice. I had to go. That was it. The difference between me and Max is that Max is third and I’m 17th.”
Ocon’s anguish was exasperated by team-mate Pierre Gasly reaching Q3 and ending up fifth, which will become fourth on the grid due to Carlos Sainz’s 10-place grid penalty.
Amid Alpine’s continued struggles on low-downforce tracks this season, Gasly concedes that the team was anticipating a double Q1 exit ahead of qualifying.
“I mean, we expect it to be both out in Q1, in the end, we qualified fifth, which is probably the best qualifying of the year on a track, which doesn’t, on paper, doesn’t suit our car,” he beamed. “It’s all these long straights.
“So, I’m very pleased. [The] weekend was also compromised with some setup work for next year and trying to understand a few things on next year’s car.
“So until qualifying, I didn’t have the setup that we wanted. And, yeah, the car came alive and I felt very confident to push it to the limit. I took some risk but measured risk and it paid off.”
He added: “We were concerned about many things and it turned out to be a, a pretty good day. So yeah, we’ll keep the same approach. We have a few data; I think everyone is going into tomorrow with a lot of unknown and will have to figure out along the way.
“So I’m just pleased the feeling today was strong. Hopefully it can be the same tomorrow, the first time that I felt good in the car this weekend. So it’s good that it’s with the car set up I’ll have tomorrow.”
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