Photo credit: BWT Alpine F1 Team
Alpine have had a rocky start to their F1 season this year. While the results on paper look moderately okay, the issues with reliability have plagued the French team and its drivers, Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon.
In the most recent race, the Canadian Grand Prix, Gasly pulled to the side of the track after only 8 minutes of the first Free Practice session due to a steering wheel fault which made it lose power. This failure and a CCTV malfunction left the only session not threatened by rain on Friday and Saturday to be red flagged and ultimately abandoned.
While Alpine recognises their setbacks, their sporting director Alan Permane knows the work that is laid out for them to fix the issues. He remains calm in the adversity of his cars’ reliability:
“You just have to go back, look at the life of everything. Look at if [a part] has been mistreated in any way – has it had a hard life somehow? Try and understand why that has failed. Yes, we have had some reliability problems and we do need to get on top of them. But there isn’t one thing that we’re panicking about. We’ve had some niggles and I’m sure we will iron them out.”
There is also a threat that Gasly may have to change his power unit and incur penalties later on in the season. However, Permane shut down that speculation as much as he could:
“He’s got enough to get him through to the rest of the year. There’s far cleverer people than me looking at that and allocation of mileages and power degradations, and all those sort of things. But at the moment, plans are to go through the rest of the year without a penalty.”
When explaining the aforementioned steering wheel fault, Permane explained that there was nothing that the team could have done, and that the part had been absolutely perfect since 2008:
“We have to take responsibility for it, honestly. The steering wheel problem we had with Pierre’s car is a complete freak [issue]. I was talking to the electronic guys. It’s a part we buy, and I think it’s probably on every single steering wheel up and down the pit lane. The design hasn’t changed since 2008 and it’s been bulletproof. The power supply failed and we lost the clutch. That’s why you heard Pierre say he thought he’d lost the driveshaft. But what had actually happened, it pushed the clutch in. Those things are tricky.”
Alpine find themselves P5 in the standings heading into this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix.
