Esteban Ocon, the Haas driver, has called for the FIA to ban the tactics used by a number of teams during the Monaco Grand Prix, arguing that it is “not really fair.”

Mandatory pit stops were in place for this year’s Monaco Grand Prix with drivers forced to stop twice over the course of the 78-lap race.

Esteban Ocon: FIA should ban Monaco GP team tactics

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

It resulted in teams like Racing Bulls and Williams deploying desperate tactics to maximise their results, with Liam Lawson and Carlos Sainz deliberating dropping their pace to assist their respective team-mates Isack Hadjar and Alex Albon.

All four drivers made it into the points in Monte Carlo, with Hadjar recording his best result of the season with sixth place – one position ahead of Ocon’s Haas.

James Vowles, the Williams team principal, later confessed: “This isn’t how I like to go racing but that’s what the rules have created.”

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Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com after the race, Ocon called for the FIA to step in and prevent drivers from lapping several seconds off the pace in the future.

He said: “I think, honestly, these tactics, this race, with people driving four seconds off the pace, was not nice.

“It’s super artificial, it’s a lot of team orders and it’s not pure as a sport, as we love it.

“This is not DTM and we want this to stay pure to a certain extent, so that should be banned from the FIA and I’m sure people will look at it, because you can’t just back everyone up three seconds a lap like that.

“It’s not really fair on others.”

Asked how Racing Bulls’ tactics affected his race, he added: “I had a buffer in the back with Liam, but Isack was just backing off so much that he caught up 24 seconds towards the end.

“I was like: ‘Oh yeah, 24 seconds gap!’ And then five laps later he was in the back of us pretty much.

“But I didn’t have enough of a gap to pit in from what I believe, because Liam just cleared Isack but Isack was six or seven seconds in front because I had Fernando [Alonso] in between.

“On that side it didn’t really help my race, but it was quite difficult to see who was doing tactics, who didn’t have pace.

“Fernando struggled a little bit at one point with pace and we managed to clear him before he had the issue, so that was the really only the real fight we had on track.”

Ocon, who recorded his best result since finishing fifth in China, admitted that he found the race “very stressful” with the driver in more contact than usual with race engineer Laura Mueller as Haas plotted their way through the race.

He said: “Very stressful!

“It opened up a lot of things early on and there was twice the amount of management about when to push, when to create the gap and it was not easy to get everything right.

“We kept chatting with Laura the whole way through the race, but I think we’ve maximised what we had in our hands.

“Well done to Isack because he didn’t put a foot wrong the whole weekend.

“He was a bit quicker in qualifying and obviously ended up in front in the race, so that’s where we deserve to finish.

“But a well executed weekend from the whole team, from qualifying to the race, and we can be pleased with that.

“Six points is a big thing for us, so happy.”

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Asked for his overall thoughts on the two-stop rule in place in Monaco, he added: “I think you guys [the media should] tell us! I don’t know, I didn’t see the race.

“I think, unfortunately, it feels like we’ve done our two stops, cleared them and then we were OK. We stayed there.

“I think there’s no magic trick to that race.

“[To improve Monaco you could have] maybe no chicane and then straight into Turn 12, but there would not be a lot of run-off to brake [from high speed] there. Maybe there would be overtakes if we do that.

“We love Monaco as it is. I don’t think we should do artificial stuff with it. It’s Monaco, we know.

“Still a lot of people turned up and we had a lot of support around the track, so let’s keep it like that.”

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