Disaster struck at the second restart when Ocon and Gasly collided, leaving Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer to despair.
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With Esteban Ocon moving into the points after qualifying just outside the top 10, Pierre Gasly running fifth and maintaining his distance from a Ferrari in front, it was looking like Alpine’s best race of the year so far. But everything quickly turned disastrous. After being baulked by Carlos Sainz, who was tangled up with Fernando Alonso, Pierre Gasly had taken to the grass at Turn 3. The French driver drifted across the track to take the racing line and came into contact with his teammate as he tried to speed back up to racing speed.
While the AlphaTauri managed to pass, Ocon’s gap with Yuki Tsunoda narrowed, and the ensuing collision sent both pink cars into the barriers. Ocon had been attempting to follow Yuki Tsunoda through. Disaster struck at the second restart when Ocon and Gasly collided, leaving Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer to despair.
“Well, they each apologised, so they each thought they played a role in it,” said their Team Principal after the race. “It was just chaos out there; had Pierre not gone wide in Turn 1 – but a lot of people did – then I think he would have been further up the road. Esteban at the same time just followed Tsunoda through on the racing line and Pierre didn’t see him and came over to the racing line and just hit him. Which is… unfortunate.”
“It’s a shame that they came together. As far as trying to blame one or the other, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do; the right thing to do is to learn from it. There’s so much chaos there and you’ve got to make quick decisions,” Szaufner continued.
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“If you look at the onboard and the replay, Tsunoda gets through, Esteban [Ocon] tries to follow him. You don’t know what Pierre’s going to do and Pierre’s just trying to get back to the racing line, it’s not like he’s looking in the mirrors and seeing somebody and saying ‘oh I’m going to block him’, he’s looking the other way, getting on the racing line thinking no one is there.”
Carlos Sainz was miffed that he had dropped from fourth to 12th place at the finish line of the Australian Grand Prix due to a penalty for colliding with Fernando Alonso. Sainz and Alonso engaged in a wheel-to-wheel battle into Turn 1 on the penultimate restart of a race that featured numerous Safety Cars and red flags, with the Ferrari driver sending his Aston Martin rival into a spin. Before the final restart and lap to the finish, when his engineer informed Sainz of the penalty, the Spaniard was heard yelling over the radio and pleading with the stewards to hold off until he had spoken with them in person.
“Oh, sorry. Right now, I cannot talk. I’m too angry, too disappointed, too… I just cannot say anything,” the Spaniard said when asked about the matter post race. “I prefer to go to the stewards, get the penalty away, because I don’t think I deserve it and it’s the most unfair penalty I’ve seen in my life. I will go first to the stewards. I needed to come first to the TV pen; if I don’t come [here] they put me in another penalty, so…”
