This time last week, F1 headed to Miami. The race itself split the opinion of fans, but one thing we know for certain is Fernando Alonso was in the FIA’s bad books.
The Alpine driver made a promising start, jumping four places by the first lap. However, things quickly unravelled as the race went on.
He first made contact with Pierre Gasly, which gave him a five-second penalty.
Fernando then got yeeted out the points after “leaving the track and gaining an advantage” when skipping the chicane with only a few laps of the race left. That resulted in another five-second time penalty.
Alpine made a statement in the middle of the week, with their CEO Laurent Rossi explaining that “ Fernando handed back the time during the lap and we were not able to present the evidence to clarify the particular situation before the penalty was issued”.
With the opportunity to explain, we’re very confident Fernando would have kept his ninth place. We’ll go again next weekend in Spain where we’re determined to piece together a much slicker and, a more fair, race weekend and demonstrate the real potential of our package.” (6/6)
— BWT Alpine F1 Team (@AlpineF1Team) May 11, 2022
Well, now Alpine’s Team Principal, Otmar Szafnauer, has given his thoughts to The Race.
“We need to speak with the FIA at the next grand prix,” he stressed.
As part of new 2022 rules , drivers and teams are now responsible for giving back advantages gained when going off track.
“We need clarity on this,” Otmar added. “We need a way to say, ‘look, you gotta give more time back’.
“It would be really nice to get feedback in the race to say ‘you didn’t give enough back’ because Fernando, once he got onto the main straight, lifted twice significantly, and I don’t know if he gave all the time back or most of the time back, but a lot of the time back.
“And when he’s driving the car, he’s got to then figure out ‘Did I give it all back, did I give some of it back, did I give enough back?’”
Fernando will be hoping for a better result at his home race next week 🤞
