Alpine left Italy with no points, after what was the worst outing for the team so far this season.

On the wet asphalt of the Autodromo the two A522 had managed to gain positions following the incidents in the opening laps.

However, Fernando Alonso was caught up in that chaos and was hit while exiting Turn 3.
The contact damaged the right sidepod of his single-seater and the floor and the Spaniard was forced to retire only a few laps into the Grand Prix.

“It was another unfortunate race for us this season,” he commented.

“We made a decent start and moved up to eighth but there was a lot of damage on the right side of my floor and on the sidepod, so we had no choice but to retire. It’s unlucky as a small brush with Mick [Schumacher], which wasn’t intentional, destroyed our car and race.”

This is the second DNF in only four races for Alonso, as he had to park his car 36 laps into the race in Jeddah due to a water pump issue.

An unlucky start of the season that saw him score points only in the opening race in Bahrain where he finished P9.  

“After Australia I feel that I could have scored 20 or 30 points in the championship, and I have only two. It’s unlucky! It’s a long season and there are plenty of points still to score.”

On the other side, this was the first race this season without points for his teammate Esteban Ocon.

The French was chasing a finish in the points, but went no further than P11 where he stayed for almost the whole race. Chances of ending up in the top 10 faded after he stopped for Mediums, as he had an incident with Lewis Hamilton while coming out of the pits for which he received a five-second penalty for unsafe release.
“It was a frustrating race for us in the end where we’ve not scored any points,” said Ocon.

“For me, it’s been a tricky one since the beginning and the Qualifying result compromised the rest of my weekend so if you think about it, where we ended up today before the penalty is not too bad. We lacked a bit of race pace and in the end we were not quick enough to get into the points even without the five second penalty.”

“It’s a really tight pit-lane but we’ll be looking at exactly what happened in the debrief tonight to see if it could’ve been avoided. We’ll learn and move on from this one, and I’m already looking forward to Miami.”

A tough chapter from which Alpine is now to take the motivation needed to improve and look forward to the next race in Miami.

“Plain and simple, this weekend was a disappointing one for the team and it’s the first race of the season where we leave without scoring points,” said CEO Laurent Rossi.

“We must make sure this does not happen again this year as we have much stronger potential than that. As a team there are many areas we must improve, and we must also eradicate errors quickly if we are to achieve our ambitious goals.”

“While we feel frustrated by today’s result, we will count on it as additional motivation to not have this feeling again during the year. I’m confident in the team to keep working hard and we absolutely must bounce back next time in Miami.”