Alpine boss Otmar Szafnauer has provided reassurance to the F1 team after suffering back-to-back DNFs.
The French marque has endured a torrid time over the last two grands prix in Britain and Hungary where Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have both exited early.
At Silverstone, a hydraulics leak forced Ocon into retirement after 12 laps, before a Safety Car played havoc with Gasly’s race, leading to a collision with Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll that led to him retiring with six laps remaining.
At the Hungaroring on Sunday, the duo were innocent victims in a chain-effect incident, sparked by Zhou Guanyu’s slow start from fifth on the grid, and a late braking moment into Turn 1 that resulted in him running into the back of AlphaTauri’s Daniel Ricciardo.
In turn, Ricciardo clipped Ocon from behind, sending him careering into Gasly and a collision that forced his car airborne, with the impact upon landing breaking his seat. Due to the extent of the damage to both cars, they both had to retire.
Asked by Speedcafe whether he had spoken to the team in order to raise morale after two devastating weekends, Szafnauer said: “It’s funny you ask that because I went around the garage and told all the boys and girls, ‘Look, just keep doing what you’re doing, focus on the things that we have control over, and the other things will eventually come’.
“We didn’t have control over the two DNFs, and we really didn’t have control over the DNFs at Silverstone,” the Alpine boss added.
“One was a pump failure from a manufacturer that makes pumps for helicopters and airlines. They’re an aerospace company, they rarely have failures, and this one just happened to fail.
“And then the other one was a Safety Car issue, and you can’t predict those things.
“So I told them not to worry about those things, to focus on what we can control and do a good job from there. I’m going to do the same.”
Although Szafnauer insisted “there was nothing we could do” about the incident at the Hungaroring, a small part of what occurred was self-inflicted.
That was due to the fact Ocon and Gasly qualified a lowly 12th and 15th respectively, ensuring they were mid-pack by the time the field approached Turn 1.
Failing to escape Q2 on Pirelli’s medium compound rubber was the root cause as the newly trialled ‘alternative tyre allocation’ for qualifying caught out Alpine.
Whereas in regular qualifying Alpine would have used the soft tyres to try and reach Q3, on this occasion, with the compounds set for each qualifying segment – and the mediums only designated for Q2 – they ran into trouble.
“We struggled a little bit with the medium tyres in qualifying,” said Szafnauer. “We were much more used to the softs running in Q2, and we were actually pretty good on the softs when we ran them both in FP3 and FP2.
“I think in FP2 everyone ran softs and we were third and fifth (fastest), but we just couldn’t get the mediums working properly.
“Therefore, we started 12th and 15th, and when you start in the midfield like that, you saw what can happen.”
Recognising that understanding the medium tyre for the next ATA trial at the Italian GP in early September is an area Alpine can control, Szafnauer said: “We have to do a better job on when we have to run the medium tyre in qualifying.
“We need to understand it more, be able to turn it on and qualify where we should have qualified.”
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