OCON’S BUMPY RIDE BACK INTO THE BIG TIME
It’ s been an uneasy ride for Esteban Ocon since his Formula 1 comeback - and fresh challenges lie in wait as he's joined by double world champion (and renowned agitator) Fernando Alonso in the newly rebranded Alpine team...
“STARTING STRONG IS GOOD. FINISHING STRONG IS EPIC”
An aphorism which sounds as if it might have tripped from the tongue of an author of selfhelp manuals (it has: Robin Sharma, no less), but is no less astutely observed for being so. For Esteban Ocon it’s a mantra to live by as he seeks to preserve the momentum of the season just passed, one in which he built from shaky foundations to a feisty maiden podium finish in the penultimate round.
Twelve months ago, the prevailing expectation was that the line-up of Ocon and Daniel Ricciardo at Renault was potentially the spiciest on the grid, given each had a history of on-track rancour with team-mates. Ricciardo went to Renault after feeling the Red Bull love tilt inexorably in the direction of Max Verstappen, even after the clash between the two in Baku in 2018. At Racing Point, Ocon and Sergio Pérez had formed possibly the least cuddly partnership since Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya at Williams in the mid2000s – to the extent of being threatened with sanctions by the team if they carried on colliding. Ocon’s nationality also offered the tantalising possibility of favouritism within the proudly French-flagged Renault organisation.
These expectations fizzled out over the course of a 2020 season in which Ricciardo generally showed Ocon his rear wing in qualifying and during races – and on the occasions when they were fighting for the same stretch of asphalt it was generally as a consequence of split strategies which resulted in team orders for Ocon to move over. It wasn’t quite the rollocking comeback Ocon might have been hoping for and it illuminates the difficulty in squeezing the final few tenths from an F1 car. These are margins you find not through bravura and natural talent but by sifting through data and teasing out fragments of useful information.
“I think the biggest challenge has been to get back up to speed – and quickly,” Ocon says. “You can kind of get back up to speed, but the last details take longer. What’s been difficult in this past season is that we were going through three races, then just one week of a break, and then three races again. So, we had a limited amount of time to analyse and come back stronger for the next one compared with a normal season.
“But our progression has been good, I would say, and we’re pretty pleased with that. Where I’m coming from is that we ended the year a lot stronger than at the beginning, and this is what we have to take on board for next season and start from there, from the much higher level. Obviously, Daniel [Ricciardo] stepped up from his first year at Renault to his second year and I’m looking to do the same.”
In an interview with GP Racing last year Lando Norris spoke of how he’d used the enforced downtime of the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, analysing nuances of the data from the preceding season. This was a luxury Ocon didn’t have, since he’d spent 2019 as Mercedes’ reserve and therefore had no grands prix to review forensically in that way. There was also the matter of having to establish relationships in a different team, with a second-year driver alongside, and with the additional impediment of new socialdistancing and mask-wearing protocols.
“I have a great relationship with Fernando and a lot of respect for him as well. I get on well with him, so there’s no issues there at all”
“It has been a very tough season in that we couldn’t go as much as we wanted to the factory to analyse, to do simulator correlation and preparation for races,” Ocon says. “Because of travel restrictions, quarantine rules and so on, I probably spent 50% less time at the factory, on the sim, than I otherwise would.
“So that’s not been a great help but it’s not an excuse, because everyone has the same situation. In the end I found my way around and I’ve been a lot more comfortable recently than I was at the beginning of last season.
“Being out for a year, and then coming back into a new team is not an easy thing… What I’ve learned from this last year is crucial – working in a different way from what I did with my previous teams and finding the right words.”
Key relationships such as those between the driver and their engineer, as well as between the driver and the rest of the trackside personnel, naturally take time to bed in. In the early races of last season, it became apparent the machinery wasn’t running as smoothly as it might, as Ocon qualified an average of two tenths behind Ricciardo and failed more often to make it to Q3, limiting his strategic choices.
In first half of the Styrian GP – where Ocon outqualified Ricciardo for the first of just two occasions all season – there was a curious phase in which Ocon fought to defend sixth from Ricciardo, even though he was on degrading soft-compound tyres while his team-mate was pushing hard on mediums with plenty of life left. In the absence of team orders Ricciardo had to push his way through on lap 19 – arguably about four laps too late since fifth-placed Carlos Sainz was pulling away. Ocon retired six laps later when a radiator weld failed. Ricciardo said he believed team orders “were coming”, but the delay was suggestive: was it a pitwall dither over potential strategic outcomes? Or were they unsure of Ocon’s response to orders, given previous form?
While the gap between the Renault drivers in qualifying over the first half of 2020 was relatively small, it tended to have a disproportionate effect on outcomes because Ricciardo made it into Q3 regularly and Ocon didn’t. This generally consigned Ocon to offset strategies requiring him to start on harder tyres in the hope of gaining track position as those immediately ahead on softer rubber pitted. As a consequence, there came several moments in which Ricciardo had to pass his team-mate while Ocon was beginning to struggle for grip on ageing rubber, adding to the impression that the Australian had the upper hand.
In what became a season of two halves, Ocon reduced his average pace deficit in qualifying to a tenth of a second. If there was a turning point, we might pin it down to the Italian GP weekend, where frustrations boiled to the surface. During the red-flag period which defined the outcome of the race, Ocon ultimately chose used softs rather than new hards in order to be stronger at the restart, though the radio conversation between him and veteran engineer Mark Slade (who engineered Mika Häkkinen to two world championships at Mclaren and latterly worked with Kimi Räikkonen at both Mclaren and ‘Team Enstone’) revealed some initial uncertainty over how many laps the used tyres had done. Ocon then distracted himself by enquiring about what Ricciardo was doing and quibbling about how many positions he had lost as a result of Renault double-stacking its drivers in the pits under the Safety Car before the red flag.
Informed that Ricciardo would take the restart on mediums, Ocon described that as “the right choice” – but the only mediums available to him were a used set which hadn’t been in tyre blankets and were too cold to use. Ocon duly flew at the restart, only to fade over the final laps, though his eighth place was a net gain from 12th on the grid. A rebarbative exchange then followed over the radio on the slowing-down lap as Ocon railed against the tyre choice, only to be instructed by Slade and team principal Cyril Abiteboul to keep his thoughts off an open channel.
Whatever happened behind closed doors afterwards, from this point onwards Ocon began to find more speed during qualifying, which gave him a platform to perform better over the second half of the season. At Mugello he raced strongly before being eliminated by brake failure and then, in Portugal, an outlier race where starting on a harder tyre compound paid dividends to those who could make them last, he completed 53 laps on mediums to finish eighth – ahead of Ricciardo, who had started one place in front.
Ironically, perhaps, it was Ocon’s final failure of the season to reach Q3 which set him on the path to his best result, second place in the Sakhir Grand Prix. Once again he executed a long first stint on harder rubber with aplomb, which delivered him track position before the Safety Car prompted by Jack Aitken’s late-race shunt. Running fourth at the onset of that, Ocon gained two places from Mercedes’ disarray and, though never a serious threat to new race leader Sergio Pérez, Ocon had the other Racing Point of Lance Stroll well under control.
“I think the understanding with my side of the garage was a lot stronger by the end of the year,” reflects Ocon. “And we found a much better way of building the weekend, getting the car to where I wanted it to be. Early in the year I was probably giving directions which were not the optimum for the car I had, and the understanding was not fantastic between me and the garage. We’re doing this a lot better now, everything is properly understood and we are a lot stronger all together.”
Now Ocon faces the looming presence in the garage next door of Fernando Alonso, undoubtedly one of F1’s big beasts even if he is returning after two seasons competing elsewhere, and is now nearing his 40th birthday. Alonso brings baggage not only historical – in the form of his two world championships and well-established reputation as a tantrum-prone disruptor – but also current, in that he has been hired as the figurehead of a team with ambitions and a recently installed signer of cheques (Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault since July 2020).
Ocon has raced against Alonso in F1, during Mclaren’s midfield toils in 2017 and 2018, and describes him as “tough but fair”. Ocon has yet to experience the intensity Alonso brings to off-track operations. Asked what his expectations are of working with Alonso, Ocon is diplomatic: “I have a great relationship with Fernando and a lot of respect for him as well. I get on well with him, so there’s no issues there at all.”
But with expectations from above to be met, and a hyper-competitive animal for a new teammate, Ocon is going to have to start and finish strong if he wishes his 2021 season to be truly epic for the right reasons…
“TABOREM VOLORES LOREM IPSUM DOMENICALI SINIMI, OMMOLUM QUE NATEM REPED MAGNAM LAME PERUM ET FUGIATUR? VELOUS”