Even though he asked to stop several times before his A522 say ‘enough’ Alpine ignored pleas Fernando Alonso pitting and they kept him on track as he lost a second a lap with the illusion that a safety car would come out.
In the end a virtual came out, but it was due to the Asturian’s ‘KO’, which by radio exploded against the team and after getting out of the car he showed all his frustration and impotence with a macedonia of angry gestures.
In the first moment, Otmar Szafnauerboss Alpineexplained that it was due to bad luck… but it is not the first time that he has justified a reliability problem in car 14 with it and the data shows that something is happening in the French team.
Already in statements collected by ‘As’, the Romanian explained what happened to Alonso: “At the beginning he had to drive 1.5 seconds slower than he could go, we knew it would be difficult to get to the end. It looks like a small water leak in some point, so it starts to lose pressure, and the best way to stabilize it was to cool the engine“.
“This engine was not going to be used again,” added the former head of Aston Martin just a year ago, who continued by exemplifying the case of Fernando with whom he lived in Sling with Button Y sato.
“It’s an engine problem, we don’t have the same people preparing the engine as Esteban and Fernando, so although the probability is low, it’s never zero and it can happen. I remember when I was at Honda, Takuma Sato had like 13 engine failures in a year and Jenson (Button) had zero.. We never found anything to show why that was happening. Was Takuma piloting that differently?” he adds.
Finally, he doesn’t think there is another factor apart from bad luck to explain the Oviedo’s constant reliability problems… so he understands his “frustration” and asks for his “sorry”.
“No, that we have found or can see. There is nothing that we see in the car, but in these circumstances it has always gone against Fernando. We apologize to Fernando. He will always feel frustrated when he manages a race like that and has the points at hand.”
“Let’s not forget that we froze the engines at the beginning of the year and that we decided to go further with performance because the FIA allows reliability to be solved later (with evolutions). We have fixed every problem that we have encountered. No more engine performance can be added until 2026 but we can fix reliability. Strategically it is a good decision. There will be improvements in winter for reliability. But this engine will last until 2026″, ditch.
