Alexander Albon explains the steering wheel issue he faced due to the overheating problem in F1 Bahrain GP, which hurt Logan Sargeant too.
Having come into the season with much optimism, Williams did not have a great start in F1 Bahrain GP. It was not just the lack of pace but they had issues with overheating from Mercedes power unit side, which the factory outfit also suffered from.
Such was the issue that his dash even carried the message ‘car is too hot’ at one point while he was managing it. “There’s a priority list so when the engine overheats that’s like category one,” Albon started explaining the steering wheel message. “One of the big ones. Fuel and overheating are two of the alarms that have priority over everything else.
“So once you hit them nothing on your screen is visible. So when the team were asking me to do changes on the wheel, I couldn’t do them because the alarm was covering the whole screen, I can see what was behind the alarm. Which is annoying because you do the changes to fix the overheating, so you’re in a terrible cycle.”
While talking about the race itself, Albon conceded that the pre-season limited running did come into play where they couldn’t complete their whole programme then. It only added to the power unit issues, which kept them out of points contention even.
“I think it’s likely a bit of a result of being mileage limited and having issues during testing,” said Albon. “I think we did a bit of race running and it wasn’t that bad but clearly once we got into the race situation by Lap 1, I was overheating the car and we were losing a lot of lap time in turning down the engine, clipping, staying away from cars in front.
“We couldn’t really show our pace. I actually think our pace once were in clean air was okay, but then at the same time, Logan was in the pit stops, I couldn’t pit and we went out, lost a lot of time in the pit stops. We pitted maybe four or five laps later than the others, we kind of caught everyone up by the end of the race.
“But just a bit of a messy race on our side, I think we’ve got to look through the data and the next few days before Jeddah and try and get a car that’s better. I think the only stint you can actually take from our race was the first stint, kind of, which we actually showed quite good pace. I felt like I could extend my stint quite nicely.
“And the final stint I was in clean air but everything else was just driving around a second slower than I should have been, so frustrating. The pace was decent, we definitely made a step in terms of the racecar, more drivable. But we’ve seen it, everyone’s made a step so so it’s all relative and at the minute as long as these top five teams are consistent, they don’t have any technical issues. They’re going to be in the top 10,” summed up Albon.
Teammate Sargeant even had an off-moment while he was managing the issue which occurred during qualifying as well. “It was frustrating as we had the steering wheel electronics issue in Qualifying and then it returned in the race, so the most important thing is that we need to understand the root cause of this and get it fixed going forward,” he said.
“We had a really good first lap and a great opening stint and made some good gains and it felt like it was coming to me before we had the issue. We were struggling a little with PU temp which meant I couldn’t stay close to the cars ahead, so it was just a bit of a disappointing evening. There’s nothing we can’t fix, but we need to understand everything moving forward,” summed up Sargeant.
Here’s Toto Wolff on Mercedes’ power unit issue
Here’s how F1 Bahrain GP panned out
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