A huge scare but everything ended very well for Fernando Alonso in Austin, miraculously after a crash that could have been very dangerous with Lance Stroll and finally in the points at the finish. The two men were also summoned by the race officials to explain themselves.
The Alpine F1 driver took the slipstream of his future teammate’s Aston Martin once the first safety car intervention was over, but the two men did not understand each other and clung to the middle of the straight, which raised the single-seater of the double world champion in the air before, fortunately, it falls on its four wheels.
Against all odds, Alonso was able to restart after his team fitted him with the new hard tires he kept to the finish line, to take a nice and unexpected seventh place. But for the Spaniard, the main thing was that no one was injured by this accident.
“First of all, I’m happy to be here in front of you, because I could have been just as easily at the medical center”, said the 41-year-old pilot, visibly scarred by this collision.
“We were lucky with the first safety car, we managed to get into the middleweight while remaining in the leading group. At the restart I tried to overtake Lance thanks to the suck, I changed gear at the last moment but he was moving at the time, and I would say that it’s bad luck that we didn’t understand each other “.
“I was scared when I went up in the air because when you go to the barriers, as can happen in IndyCar, you can roll away and the situation becomes very dangerous.”
“So I told myself that the car was broken and that we should retire. But once we got back to the pits, they changed the tires and the front wing and we started again. Then there were 32 laps to go and I thought we wouldn’t have it. done, but we finished seventh and it’s incredible “.
“It’s probably my best race of the season. Even physically in the last laps I was pushing like hell. But I won’t forget the fear I felt today.”
“During the last 20 laps I often thought about the accident and today I just wanted the race to end.
Ocon doesn’t understand his lack of rhythm
Starting from the pit lane, Esteban Ocon occupied the provisional top 10 of the race for a while, but the Frenchman lost pace and was unable to make his hard tires last to the finish, which forced him to stop in more and to be satisfied with the 11th. place.
Very disappointed with this poor performance, Ocon will want to understand with his team what made his weekend very complicated overall, with the elimination from Q1 yesterday.
“I was seventh or eighth at one point, so we were in the points, so the result is frustrating”, said the F1 Alpine driver.
“I think we have a lot to analyze internally, including qualifying of course, even if we managed to get back into the race well.”
