Fernando Alonso bearing the brunt of Alpine’s Formula 1 reliability woes in 2022 put an asterisk over Esteban Ocon’s intra-team victory – through which he became only the second team-mate to properly outscore Alonso over the course of a year – but Ocon still made a marked improvement this season.
Ocon’s year lacked the headline result that his Hungarian GP win provided in 2021 but he was consistently closer to Alonso, and it continues an upward trend he’s been on since initially struggling when he returned to F1 in 2020 with the Renault works team, having spent 2019 on the sidelines as Mercedes’ reserve driver.
He’s still far from being placed in F1’s top bracket of drivers and there were question marks over his team-leading capacity when Alonso’s shock switch to Aston Martin was announced.
But he’s developed into an effective performer in F1’s midfield, he’s compared well to Alonso and he matched his best result in the drivers’ championship (eighth) with 16 points finishes from 22 grands prix.
Ocon puts his continued improvement across his three years with the manufacturer partly down to changes he’s made off-track with a new training regime this year that he joked left him with “no life”.
“A lot, a lot,” Ocon said when asked if his new training regime has contributed to his performance this year.
“It’s not a secret that we’ve been working with my physio since last year, so Tom [Clark, his trainer/physio] has joined the team last year, Michel [Berthelemot, PR] is also here helping me with a lot of different stuff. So that overall makes it a very strong team.
“And it has helped me on a lot of different details, just keep energy throughout the year. But also my training centre, which my physio communicates with in France, has moved from the Pyrenees to Annecy, and I live quite close to that place. So I can basically [do] training camp between races.
“So, no life, I would say! Because I spend every day flat out working, there, but I feel a lot stronger. And I feel like I’ve kept a lot more energy than during last year, even though it’s a season more condensed, and a season where we finish earlier.”
Ocon has previously spoken of the benefit of that Pyrenees training camp and credited that for helping him build the muscle he needed to recover when he returned to racing in F1 in 2020.
Although it may seem like a minute detail, that camp moving closer to Ocon’s home is the “little details that I needed to step up”.
Ocon also spoke of getting “more important people around me” this year and building up his off-track team who help with his training programme.
He’s aware there’s further improvement to be made in 2023, particularly as he’ll be (marginally) the senior driver in the team for the first time in his F1 career, with three more F1 starts relative to team-mate Pierre Gasly and much more experience within the Enstone team.
“The team is happy with the job I’m doing at the moment,” Ocon said when asked if he’s ready to lead Alpine next year.
“So I’m not concerned that when Pierre is going to come on board, that we [won’t] have enough information.
“And I have enough experience inside the team to be straight away on pace and to help them develop early on in 2023.
“Of course, Pierre needs to be as quick as he can early on, because we need to be scoring points, but I’m sure with everything we have now we have in place, there’s going to be no issue.”
One of Ocon’s key targets for 2023 is to help Alpine get on top of the right set-up earlier in the weekend and avoid some of the anomalous weekends and form blips he’s experienced since returning to F1.
“I always have things that I’m on top of and I try to improve but you need to look at the pattern during the year, because you have things that you need differently during a race and another race,” Ocon explained.
“Sometimes you need to be more focused on helping the strategy, for example, sometimes you need to be more on the aero, because we need to really find out what’s the optimum aero level, for example.
“It’s more about predicting the things early on in the weekend and knowing where the gains are going to be, and there’s so many areas which are so difficult to predict before you arrive to a weekend.
“But the more you do races at certain tracks and the patterns are always the same at the same tracks. So you know what you are going to need to do and I have it all in here for next year.”
In order to assert himself over ex-karting rival Gasly and prove himself capable of leading Alpine’s potential charge to the front of F1, Ocon – with the help of his off-track team – will have to eliminate those last remaining performance inconsistencies and take another step.
