Born on 17 September 1996 in Evreux, Normandy, Ocon came from a working-class family whose parents sold their home to fund his karting career, the family living and travelling to races in a caravan. He won multiple French national karting titles and entered single-seaters in 2012, competing in Formula Renault 2.0 with Koiranen Motorsport. After placing third in the Eurocup in 2013 with ART Junior Team — behind Pierre Gasly and Oliver Rowland — and winning once in the Northern European Cup that year, Ocon graduated to the FIA Formula 3 European Championship with Prema Powerteam for 2014.
Ocon's 2014 campaign with Prema was authoritative from the opening round. He topped the championship standings at the first round at Silverstone and never relinquished the lead for the rest of the season. He was crowned FIA Formula 3 European champion with three races still remaining, a margin that underlined how comfortably he controlled the title fight throughout the year.
His final statistics were exceptional for the category: he finished on the podium in twenty-one of the thirty-three races contested, won nine of them, and recorded fifteen pole positions. His closest challengers were Tom Blomqvist and Max Verstappen, both of whom would go on to Formula One careers of their own, making the quality of the field that Ocon defeated particularly notable. He made a brief appearance in the 2014 Formula Renault 3.5 Series with Comtec Racing during the season as an additional development exercise.
At the end of the year, as a prize for his FIA Formula 3 European title, Ocon tested a Ferrari F10 at the Fiorano Circuit. He had already driven a Lotus E20 Formula One car at Circuit Ricardo Tormo on 22 October 2014 and made his Grand Prix weekend debut for Lotus during the first practice session at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November.
Ocon's Formula 3 European title was the qualification that led directly to his inclusion in the Mercedes Junior Team from 2015 onward. He won the GP3 Series title with ART Grand Prix in 2015 and made his Formula One race debut at the 2016 Belgian Grand Prix with Manor, replacing Rio Haryanto for the remainder of that season. He went on to race for Force India, became a Mercedes reserve driver, and returned to the grid full-time with Renault in 2020.
His maiden Formula One victory came at the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix with Alpine, a race in which he inherited the lead through the opening lap chaos and held on against Sebastian Vettel's late challenge. Ocon later joined Haas for 2025. The FIA Formula 3 European Championship of 2014 was the foundation on which the entire trajectory of his career was built, and the scale of his dominance that year remains one of the more impressive junior title victories of the 2010s.