Pierre Gasly offered his apologies to his team mate after triggering the collision which eliminated the pair of them at the end of the Australian Grand Prix.
Alpine came away from the Australian Grand Prix pointless despite having both their drivers in the top 10 with two laps to go. Gasly was running fifth, five places ahead of Esteban Ocon when the race was red-flagged for the second time.
However Gasly ran wide at turn one and rejoined the track as several cars were passing. He tangled with Ocon, which put both into the barriers at turn two.
Gasly, who is only two penalty points away from reaching the 12 which would trigger an automatic race ban, spoke only briefly after the race.
“I don’t have anything to say,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “I’m just extremely disappointed and just want to remember the positive. We didn’t expect to be fighting one Ferrari and to have Alonso in my sights for most of the race. So that’s what we will remember.
“The rest I just have no comment and I’m way too disappointed to be standing here and looking at these guys doing one lap.”
Ocon said his team mate apologised for the collision. He feels he could have easily tangled with any other driver at the “chaotic” restart.
“It could have been any one that I collided with to be honest, because there was a lot of cars going off,” he said. “Obviously it ended up being Pierre not leaving me much space, but no hard feelings, he came and apologised. As I said, it could have been anyone.”
Ocon’s said his race was going well until it was ruined by one of the red flags. “Nothing really clicked in our direction the whole weekend, things that were out of our control really,” he said.
“It’s extremely frustrating because we had good pace. I think we were similar to the Astons, the Ferrari in front so we could have been much further up. We were just racing on our own passing some cars, so we were doing a good race from where we were.
“But that red flag just killed our strategy. We were going to be fourth or fifth, probably, without the red flag, but that killed it completely.”
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2023 Australian Grand Prix
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