Esteban Ocon admits he “deserved the penalty” for his clash with Franco Colapinto during the Chinese Grand Prix and apologised to the Alpine driver post-race.<\/p>\n
Both Colapinto and Ocon<\/a> found themselves towards the front early in Sunday’s race at the Shanghai International Circuit<\/a>, having started on the hard tyre and deciding to stay out as most of the field headed to the pit lane under a Safety Car.<\/p>\n The pair continued their on-track battle to the midway point of the race, Colapinto rejoining from the pits after his stop just in front of Ocon, who had pitted three laps earlier.<\/p>\n But as Colapinto took a wide line through the long right of Turns 1-2, Ocon made an attempt up the inside into an ever-closing gap with the Haas driver hitting the Alpine’s right-rear tyre as both cars spun.<\/p>\n Able to rejoin, Colapinto finished the race in P10 with Ocon down in P14, the Frenchman having been handed a 10-second penalty for the incident, which he claimed full responsibility for.<\/p>\n “It’s my fault, I did a mistake, I misjudged it.” said Ocon, who also posted his apology on social media having spoken with Colapinto in the media pen after the race. “I’m glad that Franco still got a point because he drove a very good race.<\/p>\n “We did good fights all the way until then. It’s a shame it ended like this but he’s still in the top 10, so that’s very good. I deserved the penalty today, it’s very clear.<\/p>\n “But we were on for a very good race, but this is the second time in a row, two races that we pick up the Safety Car at the wrong point.<\/p>\n “We started on the reverse strategy and I knew that was going to happen. It was looking good until then for very good points, so disappointed.”<\/p>\n Haas<\/a> team mate Ollie Bearman<\/a> did finish in the points, the Briton proving to be best of the rest in P5, adding to his points finishes in Australia and China Sprint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Esteban Ocon admits he “deserved the penalty” for his clash with Franco Colapinto during the Chinese Grand Prix…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-540133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}