The Alpine F1 Team has identified the cause of the reliability problems that have affected drivers in the last two race weekends.
At the F1 Austrian Grand Prix Saturday sprint, Fernando Alonso was unable to start the race due to a car shutdown on the grid.
At that time, Alpine F1 identified it as a failure of the standard supply component (SSC) ECU (engine control unit) used by all F1 teams.
However, after further investigation at Enstone this week, the Alpine F1 Team realized that the ECU was not powered. He concluded that the problem was on the team side and said it was not a standard parts problem.
“I thought it was an ECU failure at that point,” said Otmar Szafnauer, head of the Alpine F1 Team.
“We were able to take it back to the factory and recreate the problem, and it wasn’t an ECU. It was a box that powers the ECU.”
“The ECU was fine, but there was a problem with the power box that powers the ECU. If it doesn’t turn on, it looks like the ECU is down. All the signs were that the ECU had failed. I didn’t know that the power box wasn’t working, and that’s part of Alpine. “
Meanwhile, the fuel pump problem that caused Esteban Ocon to retire at Silverstone was repeated after receiving the checkered flag at the Red Bull Ring sprint, which Bosch supplies to all F1 teams. It was related to high pressure pumps.
Earlier this season, some F1 teams experienced problems with standard pumps, especially electrical connections to the pumps, and the Alpine F1 team made the same fix.
“The problem with the fuel pump was that there were some early failures in the dynamo,” Otmar Szafnauer explained.
“Therefore, we tried to fix these issues ourselves. Bosch’s standard issue was a road car part, so it didn’t work with the F1 installation.”
“Some teams had this problem. We and Ferrari were exempt from the FIA to make their own fixes, so we used our own route to solve Bosch’s problem.”
“Our own fix worked well in the first nine races. There was no problem with the dynamo or the track. Then something happened. Perhaps for some reason we saw several different types of loads. , They started to fail “
“Bosch has also improved from the beginning. We have made changes to improve electrical connections. Some teams used Bosch improvements and two teams used their own improvements.”
“We are working on a new fix for France while investigating what Bosch has done recently to fix the first problem.”
Category: Category: F1 / Alpine