It's been a roller coaster tide for Alpine driver Esteban Ocon this weekend, but his luck was in on race day when he charged from a lowly 16th place on the grid to finish in fourth narrowly missing out on a podium.
Ocon was one of the unfortunate victims of the water valve cover incident just nine minutes into first practice on Thursday night, which left the team scrambling to build up a new survival cell for FP2.
Perhaps inevitably after all this, Ocon was off the pace in the remaining practice sessions and then missed the cut at the end of the first round of qualifying to leave him lining up in 16th place on the grid.
There seemed little prospect of getting into the points but instead he made up eight places on the first lap as a result of various minor collisions and early pit stops before an early Virtual Safety Car.
Ocon avoided all the trouble and took the restart after a safety car for Lando Norris' accident in P8. he was on a one-stop strategy that meant not pitting until lap 21 by which point he was running in fifth place.
The single stopper didn't suit other drivers - his own team mate Pierre Gasly ran out of rubber and fell from a peak of third place at mid-race distance to finish outside the points.
But Ocon made it work and reaped the rewards: “It’s an amazing feeling!” said Ocon. “I’m alive again, you know, after yesterday," he added, crediting turnaround in his luck to this weekend's Deadpool-themed race helmet.
"Yesterday we were injured but the healing power of the Deadpool helmet made the difference today," he suggested. "Never stop believing!"
"Super proud of the team," he commented. "What they’ve done this weekend was extraordinary, in qualifying and in the race, so we can be proud of ourselves.
"It definitely was a crazy race. We stayed away from the graining, from the degradation that everyone had, and managed to come back from P16 to P4. It just feels awesome.
"This track is very good for overtaking, we knew we could use our pace in a straight line to get by and that’s what we’ve done.
"We knew that this weekend was very strong for us, in terms of just achieving things, getting the car where we wanted. We’ve been super-strong on tyres this weekend," he added.
“Today finally things turned around and we managed to score an awesome result. I hope we can keep going like that until the end of the season, finish in Abu Dhabi on a high.
"If we can do so it would be a good end of the season," he said. The 12 points he accrued in Vegas was more than the total number of points he had earned in the previous eight rounds
In contrast, Gasly started the race from fourth but ended up out of the points after his tyres fell off the proverbial cliff during the closing laps due to degradation and graining.
“I think we had a great start, running in fourth, I think even third at some points,” Gasly said, who had also reported a battery issue.
"Fitting that set of hards was pretty chaotic for us. I grained the tyres quite early on, and just had no pace for the majority of the second part of the race. I tried to defend as much as I could, but it’s quite frustrating I must say.
"“But on the other side, I think as a team there are a lot of positives to take from the weekend," he said. "We'll do our analysis and come back next weekend for the season finale in Abu Dhabi ready to end the season as best as we can.”
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