Mattia Binotto hopes that Alfa Romeo Racing can follow the lead of Scuderia Ferrari and the Haas F1 Team and switch to the updated control electronics introduced ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix in a bid to eliminate the unreliability issues shown with the initial specification.
After Charles Leclerc lost a near-certain victory in the Bahrain Grand Prix due to an issue with his control electronics, Ferrari opted to bring an updated version to the Shanghai International Circuit for both the Monegasque driver and team-mate Sebastian Vettel, while both Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen also took the new part at Haas.
Neither of the Alfa Romeo drivers took the new specification however, and Antonio Giovinazzi suffered a similar issue to Leclerc ahead of Qualifying in China, which left the Italian at the back of the field for the start, and Ferrari team principal Binotto hopes the team will now consider changing their control electronics sooner rather than later.
“We changed it because on Charles’ car it failed in Bahrain,” Binotto is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “We know that with the initial spec of the control units we had some reliability issues so we changed it simply for a better unit.
“So, we change it on Seb [Vettel’s car] as well, for precaution, we had to change it on Charles’ because it was failed, and we asked our customer teams as well to change them.
“Haas did it, Alfa didn’t do it for installation issues, they felt [it was] too complicated, too risky for the change they had to do on installation. As a result, Antonio had an issue again in qualy. So, hopefully it will be changed as soon as possible there as well.”
