With just a few laps to go in the first race of the 2022 Formula 1 season, Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri gave up on a suspected battery failure, sparking a spectacular fire.
The Frenchman stopped at the site of Romain Grosjean’s horrific accident in 2020, prompting the safety car to come out, regrouping all the cars for a thrilling denouement.
However, those from Faenza lost that seventh place that Gasly had in his hands, and could only add to Yuki Tsunoda thanks to an eighth place. Now the Italians, with the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix just around the corner, will have to rebuild the AT03, they might even have to change the chassis.
Next weekend they will face the second round of the year in Jeddah, but rather than having the Frenchman’s car ready, in AlphaTauri they are worried in the long term, since the team admits that it may have to discard one of the two batteries of Honda available by regulation, which would almost certainly guarantee a grid penalty in a race.
The team led by Franz Tost also does not rule out that other elements of the power unit were damaged by the fire, and Gasly went from fighting with drivers like Kevin Magnussen or Fernando Alonso to not adding anything.
“I didn’t have any warning, which is strange,” the Frenchman told Motorsport.com. “I’m still not quite sure what happened just coming out of Turn 1, the whole car shut down and I parked it.
“Then the rear of the car caught fire. We were very confident after seeing the tests, we didn’t have a single problem, and that shows that in this sport you have to be grounded at all times, you can never be too confident. , I only hope that the engine has not been damaged, but we will solve it, “he said.
“It’s not the ending we would have liked,” acknowledged Gasly. “Especially after the race went so well, with a great start and a good fight with Fernando [Alonso], which was a lot of fun.”
“We were eighth quite comfortably, so it’s a shame to lose those points,” explained the Frenchman.
His team’s technical director, Jody Egginton , confirmed that they hadn’t seen any problems before: “It was an instantaneous failure, a total loss of electrical power. At the moment, it’s related to the battery, but we don’t know exactly.”
“We are looking into it, and first we have to find the fault, but a first hypothesis is that we have to change an element of the power unit,” he told Motorsport.com.
“The car was running, and then it died. We lost power immediately, it stalled and we had a fire,” he continued. “The origin of the fire could be that things that were very hot didn’t cool down as they were supposed to, and taking a little look, we’ve seen a lot of surface damage.”
Egginton admitted the team had a lot of work ahead of them before Friday’s Jeddah: “We are evaluating, but at least the rear suspension will be new, a lot of the wiring, and the bodywork is burnt.”
“We will see how the battery and ICE are, because there is a lot of material from the extinguisher on the car, and in the worst case we should change an element of the engine and the chassis, but it is too early to tell.”
“Everything connected to the power unit or the gearbox would have gotten hot, the fire was around the area, and again, everything has been filled from the extinguisher. We could change all the parts and send them to the factory for a full inspection,” he said.
