Alpine confirms Ocon’s departure as Doohan makes early F1 debut

The Alpine F1 team has confirmed that Esteban Ocon drove his last race for the Enstone team in Qatar and will be replaced by Jack Doohan at this weekend’s Abu Dhabi GP.

The team says that “the change allows Esteban to be released to Haas to drive in the post-season test in Abu Dhabi.”

Doohan will race with number 61 and will also do the Abu Dhabi test.

In a short statement is said that “the team would like to thank Esteban for his time at the team and he will remain part of the team’s history achieving the first win for Alpine in Formula 1. We wish Esteban the best for the future.”

There was no quote from Ocon himself in the statement. However after the race, and just before rumours of his departure first emerged, he alluded to what was coming.

“I would like to thank the team for their hard work over this race and their hard work over the whole year,” he said when asked about this writer about his race.

“You know, when it’s going well, it’s good to stick together. But when it’s not going so well the engineers and the mechanics, they stick together, and that’s the most important thing.”

He added: “It’s important to look ahead and prepare what we can for the future.”

It’s understood that the plan for Ocon to be dropped and replaced by Doohan only came to fruition on race day in Qatar, at the behest of Flavio Briatore.

Haas boss Ayao Komatsu had previously said that Ocon had already been granted a release to do the Haas test some time ago (see https://adamcooperf1.com/2024/10/31/ocon-and-hulkenberg-confirmed-for-new-team-debuts-at-abu-dhabi-tyre-test/.

Sadly Ocon’s final outing ended when he was involved in a sandwich between Nico Hulkenberg and Franco Colapinto at Turn 1 after he made a good initial getaway.

“I was wrong place, wrong time,” he said. “I think racing incident, unfortunately, I think we were all on the outside. Started to get quite narrow. We already outside of the track when the hard collision occurred. Unfortunately, it’s an incident, a short race for us, not something that we wanted.”

He added: “I already passed Franco, I was on the left side of Nico. He was on the hard. So it was always going to be something like this.”