Esteban Ocon has described how the lowest moment of his Formula 1 career came when he wept in the car park during the Australian Grand Prix weekend five years ago.
He was facing a season with a race seat having lost his place at Force India to Lance Stroll, whose father had purchased the team. Ocon had been poised to join Renault for 2019, but the deal fell through at the last minute.
Although Ocon found a role at Mercedes as their reserve driver, when he turned up for the first race of the season in Australia he learned he faced a long wait to sample their W10 chassis.
“Turning up at the first race, speaking to Mercedes about when was I going to be testing the car, they said, ‘oh yeah you are going to test in three or four months’,” he told the High Performance Podcast.
“Then I came back in the car back then and I cried in the parking lot, I remember. Luckily we found the solution to come back again.”
“I think that was the lowest [moment],” he continued, “Australia, 2019. I was super-happy for the team also on the success that they were having because I was part of that, I was contributing with the simulator work, all the development.
“But I was like, ‘what if I was driving that car in the races as well?’ It’s so dominating, it’s so fast. I was seeing myself, but not being there, on track and that was quite tough.”
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A deal for Ocon to join another team for 2019 fell through at the last moment. “We had two contracts with teams,” said Ocon. “One was signed, so I just had to sign it, I was going to race for the team in 2019.
“But we decided to not go to this one and go to the other and it didn’t work out with the other. It was for a misunderstanding between parties and things that I was not in control of.”
Ocon felt that was “not fair because it’s not on performance, it’s not on merit. If I’d had a bad season and the performance wasn’t there, I would have understood for me to be on the sidelines.”
“In the end I didn’t lose a year because I learned a lot with Mercedes in 2019 being reserve,” he added. “They were dominating and there are still plenty of things that I use now and makes me more of a complete driver when I came back in 2020.”
He eventually returned as a race driver at Renault, which is now Alpine.
“I missed driving so much and that gave me the love of the sport even more because I’ve…
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