Ocon frustrated as Alpine pays for “big mistake” at end of Hungary Q1

Esteban Ocon condemned Alpine’s decision not to run at the end of Q1 in Formula 1’s Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying as “not good enough” after both cars were eliminated.

Despite the emergence of further rain prior to a Q1 red flag produced by Sergio Perez’s slip into the wall at Turn 8, all teams apart from Alpine returned to the circuit in an effort to beat the drop zone.

It became evident that the circuit was improving at the very end of the session, by which time it was too late for Alpine to get either driver out on track as they plummeted towards the bottom five.

Ocon and Pierre Gasly landed at the back of the provisional grid for Sunday’s grand prix, having initially looked moderately safe while ensconced within the midfield, and the former contended that Alpine had missed a golden opportunity to make a play for the middle of the grid at the Hungaroring.

“We were 10th when we were on track, and we thought we were going to be 17th, 18th, 16th maybe at best this session, so we were going all in obviously for Q1,” Ocon explained.

“But we were 10th and 12th, so it was better than what we were expecting. We’ve done the right job up until now, but we were not out there when the conditions were at best.

“And it’s been two weekends in a row that we do these strategy mistakes. Three years ago, we were doing the right ones.

“Today, I don’t know what we do wrong, but it’s clearly not good enough, especially with the level of car performance that we have. We need to be doing things perfectly and today, we were going to be able to go through to Q2.”

Team boss Bruno Famin admitted the team had made a “big mistake”

“What happened is that we had an interesting opportunity, and we made a big mistake,” said Famin. “We made a wrong evaluation of the situation. We thought the track, which was damp will not dry enough to improve the lap time, as we were not too bad, ready to go for Q2.

“I think we wanted to preserve the set of new tyres. And in focusing on that, we just forgot the big picture. The big picture was to go ain Q2 and then, yeah, we made a mistake.

“We had one minute to react between the first sector improvement and the possibility to go out and we didn’t use it, and yeah, big mistake. We have to learn from that, to change our process, maybe decision, but just to make sure that this kind of big mistake cannot happen again.”

He added: “The…