Esteban Okon is in a rather calm and businesslike mood ahead of the start of the Bahrain race weekend, and the Alpine driver suggested not placing much importance on the results of pre-season testing.
Q: From the outside, the test results for Alpine looked rather curious…
Esteban Okon: Curious? I have never heard such reviews!
Q: Sometimes Alpine’s car was at the very bottom of the results table and you could even think Zinedine Zidane, your team’s new ambassador, was driving. What actually happened there, what program did you use during the tests?
Esteban Okon: (laughs) Well, it is possible that Zidane can show excellent speed!
Q: But it’s still too big and might not fit in the cockpit, plus it probably weighs 100 pounds…
Esteban Okon: I’m pretty tall too! And Zidane is actually in great physical shape.
Q: There’s no question about that! And yet, what did the team do during the tests?
Esteban Okon: We didn’t want to be on the first lines of the protocol. Becoming a tester isn’t such a significant achievement, and it doesn’t make much sense. Another thing is important – to understand as best as possible what settings can be used when working with a new machine. Some options were very aggressive, but overall we tested a fairly wide range – from the most aggressive to the very comfortable.
We will not conduct such experiments during race weekends, as adjusting the settings requires time in which the car remains in the garage. But in tests it was useful to do this to find out the possible limits of the adjustment range. As a result, we have chosen some good options that we will use at the start of the season, including this weekend.
Of course now in practice we will pay more attention to preparing for qualifying and we will see what we can achieve.
Question: So, are you satisfied with the results of this work with the settings and the conclusions the team has reached?
Esteban Okon: Yes, although we will understand everything only tomorrow. But in tests we really checked the effectiveness of some solutions that were quite drastic for both the car and us. It is not at all that they turned out to work, and we were not always able to get convincing results, but for tests this is normal. That’s why they are kept.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
