Esteban Ocon suspects there's a "fundamental" issue hiding under the hood of his Alpine that caused his disastrous performance in Saturday's qualifying for the French Grand Prix.
Ahead of the weekend, Ocon was pumped up for a good showing at the Circuit Paul Ricard where the local hero has his own grandstand this weekend.
But from the outset on Friday, the Alpine charger struggled for pace relative to teammate Fernando Alonso.
Saturday's FP3 confirmed a deficit that he carried into qualifying which he concluded despite his best efforts out of the top-ten in P12 while Alonso finished 7th.
"It's clearly a disappointing qualifying," Ocon said. "A terrible qualifying, I have to say. Not where we were supposed to end up, I think the car has potential to be sixth or seventh.
"So we were not happy, but we are fighting with a very inconsistent car, since a couple of races.
"We were last in FP3, which is not possible at this stage. That we are fifth in Austria and last in practice here, it's impossible.
"So not where we want to be. It's a difficult problem to fix, but there is for sure a fundamental one that we need to find."
Ocon said that he was running a near-identical set-up to Alonso, yet his A522 was behaving very differently and inconsistently to Alpine sister car.
"For example, I had a lot of oversteer at the end of the session, that I couldn't get the rear under control," he explained. "And the set-ups are very close, in general between the cars, so it shouldn't behave like that."
"I think the upgrades and everything that we bring, this is working as intended. But yeah, we're just doing a roller coaster of performance for quite a few races. So that's not possible.
"It's been working extremely well, in Austria. We were nowhere in Silverstone. We were still going to finish in the points but not where we want it to be. Nowhere in Canada, so it's working, then it's not, it's hard to understand."
©Alpine
The Frenchman alluded to a possible chassis issue not unlike the one he suffered last year which forced Alpine to replace his car.
"We'll see, but yeah, we've had issues in the past, we've seen parts broken, that we didn't manage to see for two or three Grands Prix," he said.
"And clearly we can't afford to have that happening if we want to fight for fourth in the championship."
As for Sunday's event, Ocon will launch his race from P10, thanks to the grid drops levied upon Carlos Sainz and Kevin Magnussen. But he expects that holding his own
"We are starting in the top 10, so that's a good thing already," he said. "And hopefully, we can gain a few more places and hold on to our position.
"But yeah, we will have quite a bit of performance deficit, I think."
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