Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly currently look like they'll be lining up on the back row of the grid for tomorrow's Hungarian Grand Prix, after a horrible strategy miscall by the Alpine team.
The squad was caught out by a red flag and rain midway through the first round of today's qualifying session at the Hungaroring.
They felt that conditions were too wet for anyone to improve their existing lap times at this point, and that there wasn't enough time for the track to dry up. But they were proved disastrously wrong.
As Ocon and Gasly watched on with horror from the garage, a flurry of faster laps by rival teams left the Alpine pair at the bottom of the timing screens, missing the cut for the second round by several tenths.
"We were tenth when we were on track," Ocon said, which had been much better than they had expected coming into the session. "We thought we were going to be 17th, 18th, 16th maybe at best, so we were going all in obviously for Q1.
"We were tenth and 12th so it was better than what we were expecting. We'd done the right job up until then," he adding confidently: "We were going to be able to go through to Q2.
"But we were not out there when the conditions were at their best," he continued. "I don't know what we did wrong but it's clearly not good enough, especially with the level of car performance that we have.
"The team made the call for both cars to not go out and to save the last set [of soft tyres] that we had for Q2," he explained. "DRS was disabled, so that's probably one thing that put the team a little bit out of thinking we're going to go out and improve.
"The call was strict and we didn't go out, so I trusted the team," he said. "As a strategy we have in place, an improving track will always be a team call and a track getting worse will always be a driver call.
"We showed decent pace in the mixed conditions but we misread the evolution of the track after [the red flag," he said. "Obviously we have the crossover lap time so it's quite clear what tyres are best, what conditions the track is running in.
"[That way of making decisions] has been working every time since 2020, but today it hasn't worked. I think 12th or 13th would have been possible.
"Probably things need to be different for the future," he added. "It's been two weekends in a row that we do these strategy mistakes. Three years ago we were doing the right ones.
"It is easy in hindsight," he acknowledged. "But we win and lose as a team and we did not get it right today. What is most important is to learn and make better decisions in the future.”
"We did not get it right today," his team mate agreed. With the mixed conditions, Q1 was less about car performance and more about being on track at the right time.
"We got that completely wrong today, it was a mistake and, as a result, we missed out," Gasly said. "When conditions are like that – wet to dry – usually opportunities come up and it is these chances that we have to take. Simply, we have to do better."
Alpine team principal Bruno Famin admitted that they had called it wrong today. "What happened is that we had an interesting opportunity, and we made a big mistake," he said.
"We apologise to the drivers for not giving them the opportunity in the session and we will debrief together and put measures in place to ensure this never happens again.
"We made a wrong evaluation of the situation. We thought the track, which was damp, would not dry enough to improve the lap times. We were not too bad, ready to go for Q2.
"We wanted to preserve the set of new tyres, and in focusing on that we just forgot the big picture. The big picture was to go into Q2, so yeah, we made a mistake.
"We had one minute to react between the first sector improvement and the possibility to go out and we didn't use it," he sighed. "The last minute we understood what was going to happen.
"You realise you made the mistake, but there is nothing to do," he added. "We have to learn from that, change our process [and] make sure that this kind of big mistake cannot happen again."
Famin pledged to fight for points tomorrow despite starting from the back. "Let's fight, let's fight tomorrow. We know that it's not going to be easy, but I think we need to react as a team, to be strong, to learn, to do our best.
"We are well out of position at the back of the grid and we will need things to really go our way if we are to come away with a good result. That said, we are a team of fighters and we will never give up.”
Ocon and Gasly may have some consolation tomorrow if the damaged cars of Serio Perez and Yuki Tsunoda require repairs that incur grid penalties or a pit lane start following accidents that triggered red flags in qualifying.
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