Esteban Ocon stepping down from his planned final Formula 1 race with Alpine is connected to him being allowed to test for his new team Haas, The Race has learned.
Ocon is spending an increasingly unhappy final season with an Enstone team that looks to have concluded with a first-lap Qatar Grand Prix clash - following a weekend in which he has trailed team-mate Pierre Gasly by a large margin on pure pace.
Ocon has hinted this performance discrepancy between himself and Gasly has been down to something other than driving - meaning the equipment provided by Alpine - but this has been strenuously denied by the team.
And while he was set to cap off his Alpine stint at Abu Dhabi, he is now expected to step down in favour of the team's reserve driver Jack Doohan.
Doohan has a 2025 deal with Alpine, so it will be beneficial to the team for him to make his debut a race early. And while that could come at a detriment to the team's pure points-scoring ability given Ocon's experience - and Alpine needs all the points it can get given it remains in a close fight against Haas and RB in the constructors' standings - Ocon running at Qatar GP-level pace makes him a non-threat for points anyway.
The Race understands Ocon acquiesced to the early switch in order to protect his planned test debut with his new team Haas, over which Alpine still has control.
Unlike his Mercedes counterpart Lewis Hamilton, who is not being released to test with his new team Ferrari in 2024 due to commercial considerations, Ocon did receive a green light to drive for Haas in F1's post-Abu Dhabi tyre test.
But Alpine, which has him under contract, is still free to bar him from that participation if it chooses to - and is understood to have made use of that fact to ensure it gets the line-up it wants for the Yas Marina race.
Ocon is still managed by Mercedes, whose boss Toto Wolff stopped short of admitting that missing Abu Dhabi was a done deal but alluded to the Haas test being a key element in the agreement with Alpine.
"First of all there's a contractual relationship that Esteban and we have with Alpine, on driver services," said Wolff when asked about the matter by The Race.
"And that contract expires at the end of the year.
"And then if you agree that for the benefit of the future there's a better solution that allows Esteban to get ready better for Haas, and if that depends on driving or not in Abu Dhabi, this something that we discussed today and we're going to talk about it tomorrow."
Alpine team principal Oliver Oakes confirmed that discussions about Ocon stepping out of the car to make way for Doohan in Abu Dhabi were in progress. While denying it was already a done deal, all of his comments on the matter intimated Alpine was keen that it happened.
"It comes from all sides really," Oakes said.
"You could say it’s good to get Jack in early. You could say from Esteban’s side it’s good to move on early. It suits everybody.
"The discussion is quite natural really. From both sides, it suits each other."