Alpine F1
Fernando Alonso
"It was an unfortunate end to today and overall a challenging weekend for us. Our race was quite good considering we started from the back of the grid. We were heading towards a possible top ten finish after a few back and forth battles with the Alfa Romeos and Aston Martins. There were some incidents that perhaps we need to look at. Two of them were penalised and one was not. As we were pushing towards the end of the race the rear wing broke on the penultimate corner and I looked in the mirror and it was visibly damaged, so we had to retire the car. We need to analyse it because at the moment we're not sure why it happened."
Esteban Ocon
"It was a tough day for us as a team with both Fernando and I retiring. We suspected we had a problem with the rear of the car and that's why we retired towards the end of the race. Our afternoon was compromised early on with the contact with an Alfa Romeo on the first lap through sector one. The car felt OK, but we had to pit as there was front wing damage and from there it was a difficult race. It's not an easy one to take, but the important thing now is that we reflect and recover as a team. The aim is to come back stronger for the next run of races."
Marcin Budkowski, executive director
"In summary, it's a race to forget for us. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong during this weekend. Esteban started in eleventh position on the Mediums and scoring a few points seemed a very achievable target. Unfortunately, he was hit by Giovinazzi in the first lap and suffered front wing damage, which forced us to stop to change it. From that point onwards his race was heavily compromised. There was not much to fight for, and as we suspected a problem on the car we decided to retire him as a precaution. Fernando drove a brave race starting from the back and we tried everything to sneak into the top 10, pushing very hard and taking risks, and trying a different strategy to build a tyre advantage towards the end. As we were closing in rapidly on the cars in front, we had a rear wing issue that robbed us of an exciting finish. We come out of this weekend without any points, which concludes our series of fifteen consecutive points scoring finishes. We have lots to reflect and improve on after this weekend and we will be working hard ahead of the next batch of races."
