diffuser wrote: ↑31 Aug 2026, 19:27
TyreSlip wrote: ↑31 Aug 2026, 18:39
OnEcRiTiCaL wrote: ↑31 Aug 2026, 18:19
50% the car was brake down under Alonso ,or something technical issues.
People who say Alonso was nothing special against Ocon did not watch the season or are being disingenuous. Alonso's race pace was better or a lot better than Ocon's for most of the season in 2022. Equivalent levels of reliability means Alonso finishes with 60 or 70 more points than Ocon. That is not factoring that Alonso had to overextend the remaining engines he had left throughout the season after losing two in Saudi Arabia and Australia.
Renault's engines were notorious for losing power after having 2K kilometers or more on them, and Alonso spent more time racing exhausted engines than Ocon did.
I think your point would be made clearer if you said that Alonso car was retired 6 times that year vs 2 times for Ocon. That doesn't include the number of time Alonso was DNF'd in Qualifing.
That being said Ocon was closer to Alonso than Stroll is. The biggest problem with Ocon has always been his attitude. As he gets older, and the edge comes off him, he might become a valuable #2 driver. He has to be told he is a #2 driver and he has to behave like one. Naturally the team needs to want to have a number 1 and a number 2. I remember several times in 2022 that Ocon would block Alonso, who was on fresher tires, and in the struggle with Alonso allow other cars pass both him and Alonso. Nonsense, Just let him pass, then later he'll let you pass if you're on fresher tires.
I do agree with this.
As I have said back then as well, IMO, Alonso is maybe the ultimate racer on the grid, with the best racecraft and overall experience, but he was never the ultimate qualifier on the grid.
The problem that year with Ocon was that the faster Alpine in the race (Alonso, 80% of the time) was often stuck running behind the slower Alpine (Ocon). Alonso was also partly to blame for that, because he did make some mistakes in some qualifying sessions, and sometimes Ocon simply did a better job and qualified ahead.
I do give it to Ocon that he was a fast learner. He was starting miles away in FP1 most of the time, but he kept improving session by session, with all of Alonso’s data at his disposal. Sometimes, he even managed to put together a really good lap in qualifying and get ahead. I do believe that Ocon became a better driver alongside Alonso, simply by studying Alonso's data during the FP sessions.
But the thing is, the team, the race engineers, etc., most of the time know which car is going to be faster on race day. They obtain that knowledge by gathering data from the Friday and Saturday FP sessions. If the two drivers are extremely close, then obviously they don't know for sure, but most of the time they have a pretty good idea because Alonso was faster in almost all of the sessions.
That year, on many occasions, Alpine allowed the faster Alpine to run behind the slower Alpine. That's what frustrated me the most, tbh. Alpine allowed that to happen. It seemed to me like they wanted to protect Ocon. They settled for a mediocre result sometimes just to leave Alonso stuck behind Ocon, in order to protect Alpine's relationship with Ocon in a way.
Even when Alonso tried to get past Ocon and Ocon was way too aggressive, Alpine never really reprimanded Ocon or put any boundaries on him. Alonso was furious with Ocon on many occasions and was raging on the radio.
If they had a plan to always allow the faster Alpine in a race to be ahead of the slower Alpine, McLaren wouldn't have come anywhere near them that year in the standings.
It was obvious that Otmar and Rossi had made their choices. Alpine had already given Ocon a three-year deal, and at that time, being a French team, they had invested in a French driver. It was obvious to me in 2022 that they wanted to protect that investment a lot more than they wanted to keep Alonso happy.
Well, if that was so obvious to me, or to a lot of us, I'm sure it was also obvious to Alonso. He felt that Rossi and Otmar would never give him real priority at Alpine, even when he was the faster Alpine overall and the one who could maximize a race result. So, I guess he had been looking for an exit for a while.
And by driving at this level and showing everyone that he was faster than Ocon, Alonso actually put them (Rossi and Otmar) in a difficult situation by making it really difficult for them to ditch him altogether and bring Piastri in. So they started negotiations with him, but they weren't willing to give Alonso the two-year contract he wanted.
At the end, everything went sideways for them when Vettel announced his retirement. That effectively ruined whatever plans Otmar and Rossi had and whatever leverage they thought they had.
Alonso giving them the finger (metaphorically) back then, along with the fiasco with Piastri, was the beginning of the end of Otmar's and Rossi's involvement in F1. It was obvious that heads would roll sooner or later after those two fiascos.
So IMO, Laurent Rossi and Otmar Szafnauer simply bet on the wrong horse back then. They chose to protect Ocon and their three-year contract over protecting their relationship with Alonso, and they paid the price.
