PIASTRI ASSISTED ALPINE TO F1 VICTORY

Australian Oscar Piastri revealed that he played a very small part in Esteban Ocon and Alpine’s victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday.

The Auto Action columnist and Alpine junior driver explained that on the Friday night he was at the Alpine factory in Enstone working hard on the F1 simulator hoping to find setup improvements for the F1 team in Hungary.

On Sunday Ocon took his maiden F1 victory, and Alpine’s first F1 victory since the Australian Grand Prix in 2013 known then as the Lotus F1 Team.

“I was doing race support (simulator work) for the team on Friday night,” Piastri explained. [It was a] very late night actually and then Alpine went and won on Sunday!

“Not so much me, but some of the other parts of my group are crediting me with some of the victory, I’ll take it of course, a tiny part was me, if anything.”

Ocon stayed out of trouble at the first turn while Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas collided with Lando Norris, Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, as Lance Stroll had a collision with Charles Leclerc and Daniel Ricciardo.

This cleared the road for Ocon who moved up from eighth to second.

This soon became second when Lewis Hamilton made a strategic error staying on wet tyres on a slick track which handed Ocon the lead of the race.

The Frenchman drove a mature and mistake free race, holding off the four-time champion Sebastian Vettel in his Aston Martin to take the win.

Piastri was in the Alpine factory with the team when Ocon crossed the line and recalled the reaction of the team.

“Esteban was in the right place at the right time and then did a mega job to hold off Vettel for the win,” he said.

“It was pretty awesome to watch that with the Alpine guys here, and I’ll take a little bit of credit for it, but it was certainly mostly down to Esteban.”

Yesterday Piastri took part in an F1 test with the team where he completed 500km of incident free running at Monza.

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