The first rule of Formula 1 is to never crash into your teammate, but it’s not always been perfectly adhered to.
Last season, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly hit each other at the Monaco Grand Prix which signalled the beginning of the end of the former’s time with Alpine.
It wasn’t the first time the two Frenchmen had collided and Otmar Szafnauer has predicted Alpine to be more harmonious with Jack Doohan in the car alongside Gasly at the beginning of 2025.
They’re now the only teammate to crash into each other in the history of Formula 1, with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg’s collision in Barcelona in 2016 handing Max Verstappen victory on his Red Bull debut.
Red Bull have fallen foul of this in the past as well, with Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber coming to blows in Turkey.
Szafnauer has had to deal with his fair share of tricky intra-team relationships during his time in F1.
Speaking on The Team Principals Podcast, he reminisced about the time that it got so bad between two of his drivers at Force India that they were threatened with deliberate grid penalties to keep them apart at the start of races.
Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez threatened with grid penalties while driving for Force India
During the 2017 and 2018 F1 seasons, Sergio Perez was joined by Ocon at Force India after replacing Nico Hulkenberg.
They finished fourth in the constructors’ championship during their first season together before and would have finished fifth the following year were it not for their results in the first half of the campaign being voided.
However, while these results were positive, Ocon and Perez’s relationship was frosty at best and when Szafnauer was asked if he had ever had an experience where the team just ‘broke down’ and it became two one-car teams.
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He said: “Close, Force India with Esteban and Sergio were close to that when they kept running into each other and we had to threaten them…yeah in 2017 and even in 2018 in Singapore they came together.
“We had rules of engagement and we were going to separate them by cutting their gearbox seals so they would move [on the grid]. We’d separate them at the start of the race by getting a five-place grid penalty so they wouldn’t start next to each other.
“It’s harmful for the team, but if they crash into each other, it’s worse for the team. So, it’s the least of the two evils.”
What went wrong between Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez at Force India?
Ocon’s relationship with his teammates has never been brilliant, but it became particularly toxic with Perez.
During their two seasons racing together, they collided on three occasions and as Szafnauer explained, rules of engagement had to be introduced to keep them from hurting the team any further.
The 2017 Belgian and Azerbaijan Grand Prix saw the pair crash into each other, but the final straw was the 2018 Singapore Grand Prix.
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Ocon retired on the first lap after he and Perez made contact and the Mexican could only finish P16.
After the race, the Frenchman said: “It’s a huge disappointment to be out of the race early when we had such strong pace. The car felt great this weekend and we knew a strong result was possible, but instead, we’re leaving Singapore with zero points.
“I am not going to analyse what happened at the start. All I will say is that I got off the line well and I saw an opportunity to go past Sergio. I had good grip on the outside, but then I felt a hit and I was in the wall.”
Perez laid the blame at Ocon’s door and commented: “I feel very sad about the lost opportunity today. On lap one I was coming out of turn three, picking up the power and all of a sudden I felt a hit.
“I didn’t know who it was and then the team told me it was Esteban. I feel so bad for the team because we really need to be scoring points at every race and it should have been a great day for us.”
Ocon tried to go around the outside of Perez and while he could have moved over to give him more space, it was a dangerous move to try and make on a street circuit.
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