The Alpine team’s two single-seaters introduced an upgrade to the sidepods for the opening grand prix of the 2022 Formula 1 season, but Esteban Ocon lost part of the part at the start of early free practice.
The right side of his car’s bodywork went flying down the main straight, causing the first red flag of the season. Although the team has not yet found what caused the failure, they suspect that it is a specific problem.
After carrying out a revision of the car when it returned to the garage, Alpine gave the go-ahead for the new design to remain in Fernando Alonso’s car, which had no setbacks for the rest of the session.
French team boss Otmar Szafnauer said the team would continue to seek a suitable response to what had happened, stating there was no concern that the problem would recur in the Spaniard’s car.
“I think it was a one-time thing,” he said. “We’re still trying to figure out what the root cause is, and I don’t know if the sidepod was a bit damaged, or if it didn’t have all its fixings, but Fernando ran the same [model pontoon].”
“We just made sure it was all fixed and glued down, and it was fine, so I think it’s a one-time thing. It’s still good to always, always find out what caused it, and once you know, then you’re 100% I’m sure it’s fixed.”
Ocon had to revert to the old pontoon design for the remainder of Friday practice, but Alpine are working on bringing another of the new ones to Bahrain so that the Frenchman can race it for the rest of the weekend.
“We are trying to bring another pontoon here,” Szafnauer confirmed.
Although losing this piece in practice on Friday was not ideal, the Romanian manager stated that it was one of the risks that comes with being aggressive with the developments and using them for the first time during a racing weekend.
“Because the cars are so new, improvements big and small will be paraded up and down the pitlane,” he said. “People will bring updates all the time, and I learned a long time ago in this game that unless you test things in testing, if you put it in a situation like this for the first time, things can go wrong.”
“This could have gone wrong in testing, no one would have noticed, you would have done a lap out, you would have asked what’s wrong, we fixed it, you come here and you don’t notice,” he continued. “But when you’re looking for track performance without testing, then some of these things can creep in.”
