Alpine F1 driver Esteban Ocon has said he is over the incident he had with Sebastian Vettel at the 2021 season-opener in Bahrain.
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The pair were running well down the order when Vettel crashed his Aston Martin into the back of Ocon after locking up in the braking zone for turn one.
Vettel suffered front-wing damage and received a ten-second time penalty, plus two penalty points on his Super Licence, while Ocon’s car came away from the crash with damage to its rear floor.
Commenting on the incident, Ocon revealed that Vettel apologised to him after the race and suggested he was over the crash.
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“And now I’ve watched the accident. He [Vettel] went and came in to apologize,” Ocon told reporters in Sakhir.
“He got the penalty for it. So it’s all okay. If we were fighting for good points at the time, I would have been more upset.
“It looks like I stay on my line, it looks like basically comes in my dirty air. So he’s moving to the left to the normal line, but he’s losing the grip, basically.
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“We got a little bit of damage after that. But we managed to finish the race, which, you know, shows that we fought until the end for that one,” he added.
The newly rebranded Alpine F1 Team left Bahrain without a single point on the scoreboard, after Ocon finished the season-opener down in P13 and Fernando Alonso had to retire from the race due to a sandwich bag getting lodged in his car’s airbox.
Their 2021 challenger is clearly not as competitive as last year’s car, and, based on how round one went, it seems Alpine will struggle to consistently manage double points finishes this campaign.
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