Prior to chaos created by rain, McLaren’s Stoffel Vandoorne almost retired from the 2018 Formula 1 German Grand Prix, but for the last-minutes changes from the team helped him to see the chequered flag.
It was around Lap 34 when the Belgian radioed the team of losing power from the engine. The team ran a quick check and asked for ‘Scenario 1’ mode and told him to box and retire the car instead of stopping on track.
But fortunately, while he moved slowly towards the pitlane, the team could run more tests from the pitwall and eventually they got the engine running albeit on lower power after a settings change.
“It was very strange race, I had a terrible first part,” started Vandoorne. “Then the engine suddenly decided to give up, we thought we had to retire the car. I was bringing the car to the pitlane, then the team made a call to change a lot of settings and try again.
“[And suddenly] everything seemed to be working again – a bit lower power than normal but we got ourselves back in the race. [After that] we had a two great calls with the rain coming in.
“I didn’t box and toughed it out on the slicks in the wet [on track]. In the end, 13th was the best we could have done, at least we got back in the race,” he summed up. The team hasn’t revealed more details as yet.
It remains to be seen if his Renault engine issue was similar to Red Bull Racing’s Daniel Ricciardo, who was forced to retire on Lap 29. For Vandoorne though, it could have been points scored in a difficult weekend, had the engine issue not hindered his performance.
With Fernando Alonso retiring at the fag end of the race, McLaren couldn’t score any points in another tough weekend. The Spaniard gambled with the intermediate tyres which didn’t work and the team then found a issue with the gearbox which forced him to retire.