Alpine Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer is confident that Esteban Ocon’s sidepod error during the Bahrain Grand Prix practice was a one-off.
Just over 10 minutes into the first practice session of the 2022 season, Ocon blew out the red flags as the right sidepod on his Alpine A522 broke, spreading the debris right over the start finish.
That was a new upgrade for Alpine for the season-opening race, but after that failure, the team rebuilt Ocon’s car with the old side pods.
But instead of the upgrade failing, Szafnauer suspects there will be no recurring problem.
🚩 RED FLAG 🚩
Esteban Ocon loses a large piece of sidepod 🤯
Debris destroys the start finish immediately, so the session is stopped as the cleaning begins#BahrainGP # F1 pic.twitter.com/ZHWKqIIZzr
– Formula 1 (@ F1) March 18, 2022
“I think it was a one-off,” Szafnauer confirmed, quoting Motorsport.com.
“We’re still trying to figure out the cause and I do not know if the sidepod was a bit damaged or if it did not have all its fixes. But Fernando [Alonso] ran the same.
“We just made sure everything was fixed and everything was packed properly, and it was good. So I think it’s a unique one. But it’s always nice to always, always find the cause. And if you know that, you are 100 percent sure it’s fixed.
Szafnauer further revealed that Alpine is looking to “get another pod out there” so that Ocon can still run the updated specification this weekend in Bahrain.
“Because the cars are so new, the developments will come thick and thin up the pit lane,” Szafnauer continued.
“People are going to bring developments all the time and I learned a long time ago in this game that unless you have things running in the test, when you put it in for the first time in a situation like this, things can go wrong.
“That could have gone wrong during the test. Nobody would have noticed – you would have made an out-lap, asked what’s going on, we’ll fix it, you come here and you do not notice.
“But if you contribute performance on the race track without testing, some of these things can slip through the net.”
Despite that little hick, it was an overall positive Friday for Alpine with Alonso finishing FP2 in P5, just under a second at the ultimate pace of Red Bull Max Verstappen.
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