Max Verstappen was the last driver on the grid before the pitlane closed at 2:30 p.m., emerging from his garage just seconds after Pierre Gasly in his AlphaTauri. Sergio Pérez, in the other Red Bull, had started just a little earlier as well.
The Austrian outfit has said Verstappen ‘s late arrival on the grid was due to DRS issues, and in fact the team was seen checking the rear wing before the pitlane opened.
However, it has become known that the cars of the two Honda-powered teams were delayed in leaving the garage because they had doubts about compliance with the FIA regulations on minimum fuel temperature , something that also surprised Aston Martin in Miami, where the two AMR22s had to start from the pitlane.
Article 6 of the FIA technical regulations specifies that the fuel may not be more than 10 degrees Celsius below the officially declared ambient temperature.
The regulation states: “No fuel intended for immediate use in a car may be more than ten degrees Celsius below ambient temperature.”
“When assessing compliance, the ambient temperature will be that recorded by the FIA designated weather service provider one hour before any practice session or two hours before the race. This information will also be displayed on the timing monitors.”
“The temperature of the fuel intended to be used in a car must be measured through a sensor approved and sealed by the FIA.”
For the first five races this season, with the new cars, the teams and the international federation have agreed to set the minimum fuel temperature at 18 degrees , using a fictitious ambient temperature of 28 degrees for Bahrain, Jeddah, Melbourne, Imola and Miami.
However, the figure returned to the original norm for Barcelona. The official ambient temperature determined by the FIA before the race was 35 degrees, so the fuel could not be below 25 degrees .
The teams have to put the fuel in their cars two hours before the start, and declare to the FIA the amount they have loaded into the car. The fuel gradually warms up while it’s in the car, and that process continues when the engine is started in the garage.
In the regulations, as written, there seems to be a question mark as to whether the fuel has to be at legal temperature even before the cars take to the track, as the phrase “fuel intended for immediate use in a car” could be open to interpretation.
However, a clarification that the FIA has recently sent to the teams seems to confirm that the moment in which the cars leave the garage is when the fuel must be at the temperature established by the regulations.
This clarification leaves teams potentially free to put the fuel in the cars two hours before the race at a lower than legal temperature, and then hope that it warms up before the pitlane opens and the cars leave the garage, 40 minutes before the start of the race.
If teams choose to follow this new path opening up before them, the fuel temperature when they take to the track could be lower than if it had been above the legal minimum when it entered the car, and heated up afterwards.
Teams often want cooler fuel for both reliability and performance reasons, although the latter is less important than in the days of naturally aspirated engines.
It has been learned that, in Barcelona, Red Bull and AlphaTauri realized as the start approached that they might not reach the minimum required when the pitlane opened at 2.20pm.
In order to take advantage of the almost 10 extra minutes to allow the fuel to warm up – and with the cars’ engines running – both delayed their exits from the garage until the last possible moment, before the pitlane closed at 2pm. :30 hours.
As a result, the cars were unable to do the usual two or three laps prior to the race with a diversion through the pitlane to avoid the grid, nor were they able to practice the starts for the last time.
The two teams were in a better situation than Aston Martin in Miami, where the Silverstone team made a mistake in their processes. This took them so far away from the required numbers that the cars were unable to make it to the grid in time while the fuel temperature was being adjusted.
There is no doubt that the fuel for the Red Bulls and AlphaTauris was at legal temperature when they left the garage, as the numbers are controlled by the FIA and any discrepancies would have been flagged by the federation.
However, after the race Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto created a stir when he indicated that he believed the fuel has to be above the minimum “at all times”, and suggested that a team cannot warm it up by running the power unit of the car.
In fact, his words suggest that perhaps his interpretation of the regulations is different from what the last clarification suggests, and that it could be driven by the fact that Ferrari is less concerned about the high temperatures reached by the fuel. .
“Obviously I can’t know what was going on at the time,” he said of Verstappen’s late arrival on the grid. “I can imagine it was due to the temperature of the fuel in the tank, which must be at most 10 degrees below ambient.”
“I think the rulebook needs to be at all times during the event. So not just when the car is going out, but also in the garage itself.”
“So I don’t think starting the car to warm up a tank of fuel is enough, because it has to be no more than 10 degrees [below ambient] at all times, so I can only trust the FIA.
“So it’s hard for me to understand that maybe they were heating the fuel through starting the car, because it doesn’t explain it.”
“Because as I said, [complying with temperature] should be at all times. But I can only trust the FIA and I’m pretty sure they’ve checked it. Maybe it’s not the right explanation, so you’d have to ask them. “, dropped the Ferrari boss.
If it comes to nothing else, the Aston incident in Miami and what happened with Red Bull and AlphaTauri in Barcelona has at least added a new focus on the matter of fuel cooling, and whatever advantage there may be. by lowering the temperature of it below the limit when it first gets into the cars before the race.
