Ocon accepts penalty for “ruining George’s lap”

2020 70th Anniversary Grand Prix

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Esteban Ocon said the stewards were correct to penalise him for holding up George Russell during qualifying.

The Renault driver moved to overtake Antonio Giovinazzi when Russell caught the pair of them, delaying the Williams driver. Renault had not advised Ocon that Russell was in pursuit.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Ocon. “What happened is I was on the out-lap. I was overtaking Giovinazzi but I was not aware that Russell was coming. So I got the penalty.

“I think it’s deserved. It ruined George’s lap so it was not well-managed from our side.”

Despite the incident in Q1, Ocon and Russell made it through to Q2, but no further.

“It was definitely a tough, tough qualifying,” said Ocon, who qualified 11th before his penalty. “Just from the beginning, the penalty and the performance overall that we had today, I’m definitely not happy with the end result.

“There’s a lot of tests that we’ve done basically yesterday and today we didn’t find the right thing to put on our car.”

Ocon’s team mate Ricciardo reached Q3 and qualified in third place.

“There’s clearly a difference between the two cars,” said Ocon. “Obviously they are the same spec, but we are looking to see what went wrong on mine and what we could do better to close that gap down and see where it comes from.”

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Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...
Josh Holland
USA-based Josh joined the RaceFans team in 2018. Josh helps produce our Formula 1 race weekend coverage, assists with our social media activities and...

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6 comments on “Ocon accepts penalty for “ruining George’s lap””

  1. “Ocon’s team mate Ricciardo reached Q3 and qualified in fifth place” :)

    1. “Ocon accepts penalty for “ruining George’s lap”

      Two authors, but nothing in the text about what penalty. Lucky that an earlier article does mention what the penalty is… 🙄

  2. All good. Russell got to Q2 anyway. But it is good to see an honest apology.

  3. I was expecting more from Ocon this year.
    Doesn’t look like this competition break did him any favours … I remember him being more aggressive with the car, now he seems to be riding around at less than 100%. Mentally damaged by just driving around in a simulator or too long gathering data?

    1. Always found Ocon to be over-hyped. He wasn’t consistently beating Perez either who is at best a number 1.5 driver. He is more of a number 2 driver occasionally challenging the lead driver, may be a notch below Bottas.

    2. Imagine what a year being Alonso’s teammate will do to his career.

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