Ocon seeking 'restart and reset' after triple-header slump

Esteban Ocon is aiming for a fresh start at next week's British Grand Prix and for a significant overhaul of his Alpine A521 after a poor run of form in F1's last three races.

After a productive start to his 2021 campaign in which he outperformed and outscored teammate Fernando Alonso in four of the five first races, Ocon has gradually lost ground.

In Austria, the Frenchman failed to exit Q1 in both round held at the Red Bull Ring, while a lowly P14 in the Styrian Grand Prix was followed by an early retirement in last weekend's race due to an unfortunate opening lap collision while he was engulfed in the thick of the pack.

"Well I think it is a little bit the consequence of starting further back unfortunately," Ocon explained. "We know starting back there is always more incidents and contact and stuff happening, when you are not correctly positioned.

"Obviously disappointed but I think we have to turn the page, we have to restart from zero, reset, prepare Silverstone the best way we can.

"It’ll be starting already next week, but yeah, let’s forget those last two weekends, regroup, and come back stronger at Silverstone."

Ocon justified his underperformance relative to Alonso by a clear deficit imbedded somewhere in his car.

"We see a few things, and we are seeing some deficit, but it is hard to place the finger on exactly what it is," he said.

"As I said also we don’t want to give information on what it could be, because it is already hard enough to put the finger on it, so I don’t want to place myself onto that, but we will start from fresh at Silverstone, change as much parts as we can on the car, and hopefully come back much stronger.

"But for sure to be one second slower on the first run compared to Fernando, it is too big, the difference, so there is definitely something that was not working right and that we need to understand."

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Ahead of next week's return to action, the 24-year-old intended on sitting down with his team to get to the bottom of his car's issues which implies an overhaul and choosing which parts to change.

"Yeah exactly, that’s what we are going to obviously find out next week, the discussions we’ll have with the guys," Ocon said.

"I see we are discussing about changing some parts already, to just restart fresh, so we’ll see exactly what is the plan, that’s going to be defined next week.

"But yeah we are only Sunday, so there’s still a few more days to think about it, what we can do, and restart as fresh as we can be. Because obviously the deficit and the performance we had was not good enough this weekend and last weekend."

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