At the recent Austrian GP , Alonso was unable to even start Saturday’s sprint race after his car flamed out on the grid.
At that time, the team pointed out that in Fernando Alonso’s car there was a failure in the ECU (electronic control unit), which is a standard supply component used by all teams.
However, following investigations this week at Enstone , it was concluded that the problem lay more on the equipment side, and therefore that standard part could not be directly blamed. The ECU, which they accused, was directly not receiving power.
“At the time we thought it was an ECU fault,” Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer told Motorsport.com.
“We took it to the factory and were able to reproduce the problem. And it wasn’t the ECU. It’s a box that feeds the ECU.”
“So the ECU was fine, but the box that feeds the ECU was not okay. And if you don’t feed it, it looks like the ECU is dead. Everything indicated that the ECU had failed, but then we didn’t know that the power box didn’t it worked. And it’s an Alpine part,” he admitted.
Meanwhile, the fuel pump problem that caused Esteban Ocon to retire at Silverstone , and which was repeated in the Frenchman’s car after the checkered flag of the sprint race at the Red Bull Ring, was pump related. high pressure SSC that Bosch supplies to all equipment.
Alpine has now attributed the failure to a fix the team itself had to carry out earlier this year after several teams experienced problems with the stock pump, and specifically the electrical connection to it.
“The problem with the fuel pump is that we had a couple of power bank failures earlier in the year,” explained Szafnauer.
“So we tried to fix those problems ourselves, as the stock Bosch pump didn’t work in an F1 installation, because it’s a road car part.”
“Several teams had that problem, and we and Ferrari got permission from the FIA to make our own corrections. So we went our own way to fix the Bosch problem.”
“And our own solution worked well for the first nine races. We had no problems on the power bank, no problems on the track. Then something happened, we probably saw a few different types of loads for some reason. And they started to fail.”
“Bosch has also improved from the beginning, they have made changes to improve the electrical connection. So some of the teams used the Bosch improvement, and two of the teams [Ferrari and Alpine] used their own improvement.
“We are working on a new concept of ours for France, and at the same time studying what Bosch has recently done to fix their initial problem.”
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