“Do we have a problem with the power delivery or is everything ok?” This was the first time that Fernando Alonso opened the radio to communicate with Alpine during the 2022 Italian Grand Prix regarding the breakdown of his car. . “It looks good from our side,” the team replied from the pit wall. To which the Spaniard replied: ” Wow! “.
But what did the veteran Spanish pilot really mean with this radio message? When asked about it, Alonso explained what happened: “Obviously, on the radio you don’t want to say in a very obvious way that you have a problem.”
“So I wasn’t sure if that message [“it looks good”] was a real response or just a way to cover it up. In the end you’ve already seen it, we didn’t finish the race,” he explained.
Alonso completed more than half of the race with an Alpine A522 that from the outside did not seem to suffer any relevant damage, but finally had to enter the pitlane to retire and obey the orders of his team ” Something with the power unit ” Alonso said about his abandonment. “Maybe it was the water pressure. I don’t know exactly. We have to study it.”
That technical problem, therefore, confirmed the suspicion that the Spaniard had had “from the beginning” , and hence his radio message asking if the team could see something anomalous in the data from the pit wall, to which he received a negative answer.
“It seemed to me that we didn’t have the usual power delivery on the straights,” said Alonso. “We didn’t have all the energy. And that made it a tough race.”
“It was hard to keep up the pace when I was fighting with other drivers, because we weren’t very fast. We have to investigate what the reasons were, because we definitely haven’t lived up to our expectations here at Monza,” he said.
Due to the events that have taken place in recent weeks and months, social networks quickly began to create conspiracies in relation to Alonso ‘s radio, Alpine ‘s response and his subsequent retirement, which broke a streak of ten consecutive races crossing the checkered flag in the dotted area.
However, the words of #14 after the race show that everything could be within the usual parameters of a race in the highest category of motorsports, where no team wants to publicly show their rivals their weaknesses.
Fernando Alonso, after his abandonment in the 2022 Italian GP of F1
