Ocon 'pretty sure' chassis change solved pace issues

Esteban Ocon is confident that the recent chassis change undertaken by Alpine has solved the poor run of form suffered by the French driver in recent races.

After a reasonably good start to his 2021 campaign, Ocon failed to score a top-ten finish in the four races that preceded the British Grand Prix while he was also significantly outpaced by Alpine teammate Fernando Alonso.

The Enstone squad supplied a new chassis to its driver for Silverstone and improvements were immediate. Ocon finished Saturday's sprint race P9, just two spots behind Alonso, with the pair repeated the same result on race day.

• Read also: Alpine boss says Ocon's talent remains 'untapped'

"I’m pretty sure we’ve solved the issue that we had," Ocon said after last Sunday's race.

"It’s not only a chassis change that we’ve done, there was a lot of other things, background and other parts that we changed. We spotted something after that day on the Monday.

"We questioned ourselves if that could be the reason. The only thing I care about is that obviously I feel good now and as soon as we did put the car in practice 1, it was competitive like it should and that was much better."

Ocon highlighted the importance of achieving at Silverstone a good result on the back of the hardware changes.

"Very important," he said. "This is the main positive that we are going to keep from the weekend.

"In general, to be able to extract the maximum from the car since all the changes that we’ve made over the last week it’s been great and I can’t wait to be fighting for more points in Budapest."

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