Esteban Ocon will be the one who will benefit from the evolution at Alpine in China

This is a fairly unusual situation for a manufacturer team like Alpine. For the Chinese Grand Prix, scheduled for this weekend in Shanghai, the French team has decided to make an update, but only on one of its cars. An uncommon way of operating in recent years for the A arrow, which testifies to the urgency of the situation, after no points scored in four Grands Prix.

Rather than respecting the initial schedule and waiting for the Miami Grand Prix in two weeks to give the two cars the new improvements, the French team has in fact decided to rush the introduction of its new package, even if it means not provide only one car.

Alpine chooses Esteban Ocon for China

“The team has worked extremely hard and we will be able to make an upgrade to a car this weekend, one race ahead of schedule.”, explained Bruno Famin, the main team of the Tricolores a few days ago. The boss of the motorsport branch ofAlpine had not, however, specified whoEsteban Ocon or Pierre Gasly would benefit from it.

Esteban Ocon confirmed at a press conference that he was the one who would ride with it this weekend. “It’s really a great job on the part of the team to have managed to make changes to my car earlier than expected. Of course, we still don't expect massive changes in terms of performance, but we can only have pleasant surprises. Let’s see where that puts us this weekend.” 

Focused on the next challenge 🇨🇳 pic.twitter.com/R0HwiRF1QX

—BWT Alpine F1 Team (@AlpineF1Team) April 17, 2024

The fact that the pilot of theAlpine n°31 benefits from the new flat bottom first is not very surprising. Even if Pierre Gasly had a complicated start to the season due to some mishaps and bad luck on the track, Esteban Ocon still dominated him four times in qualifying. Which naturally pushed the team to entrust him with the new parts first, even if our colleagues at Race fans assure that there should be an alternation throughout the season between the two men on this subject.

Ocon took the opportunity to focus on the problems encountered so far by Alpine, focusing more on race pace than speed over a lap. “It depends where actually. In Australia, we seemed to be fighting for points against the Haas, it was a good omen until a tear-off got stuck in the brake duct. We qualified twice in Q2 (Australia and Japan), but at Suzuka we also had damage from the start which didn't help either. Despite everything, we struggle more in the race.” The fact that Pierre Gasly remains on the old specification will allow engineers to compare and collect interesting data.

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