Due to safety concerns voiced by MotoGP riders, some areas of the COTA track were smoothed ahead of the US GP, but that didn’t stop riders’ complaints last weekend.
Red Bull had to change Max Verstappen’s rear wing before qualifying after discovering a hairline crack, while both Ocon and his Alpine team-mate Esteban Ocon had to give up the Austin race with problems at the rear of their cars.
And Ocon believes there is more work to be done on the track before F1 returns.
“I think they’re on the verge of reliability,” Ocon said of the bumps. “I think if we come back next year and there is a step in that direction, I think the cars are really going to have problems.
“If you go slowly it’s not a big problem, but if you go fast there are big blows to the ground and the suspension. Engineers see red alarms when the load is heavy, and we shouldn’t see that.
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“So I think the track needs some work for next year.”
Pierre Gasly also suffered a suspension failure on his AlphaTauri car during the race which he suspected could have been caused by the bumps.
Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff admitted that the team had modified Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas’ cars to avoid a “massacre” of the worst bumps in Austin.
“The car hit pretty hard and that breaks the car,” said Wolff.
“So we took some mitigating steps so as not to break it or massacre it so hard to survive the race.
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“Definitely a compromise to get faster on the track, but maybe a necessity to actually finish.”
However, not every team had problems over the course of the US Grand Prix weekend.
“The drivers didn’t complain,” said Haas team boss Günther Steiner. “They said they were on the edge of the bump, which is acceptable.
“But there was never any concern about the reliability of the car or the car’s suspension.”
McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl also said his drivers had “nothing extraordinary” to report about the bumps.
“Personally, I have to say that I also like the fact that we have these challenges with the bumps because it gives these tracks a certain character,” he added.
“A lot of drivers also said that they actually like the added challenge, which makes it even more difficult to get the fast laps.
“So nothing negative about the bumps we saw here this weekend.”
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