24/07/2023
NEWS STORY
Alfa Romeo's Guanyu Zhou is at a loss to explain the start glitch that subsequently caused him to lose control in the opening corner of the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Having qualified an excellent fifth, two places ahead of teammate Valtteri Bottas, Alfa Romeo was hoping for a decent points haul, however the dream was over almost before it had begun.
Unable to get off the grid as the lights went out, Zhou lost position after position before finally pulling away. However, as he entered Turn 1 he locked-up and hit Daniel Ricciardo who then hit Esteban Ocon who went on to hit his Alpine teammate Pierre Gasly, leaving both of the French drivers with cars that were beyond repair.
By the end of the opening lap Zhou had dropped to 16th and was subsequently handed a 5s time penalty for causing a collision.
"Zhou failed to slow down and brake in time and collided with Ricciardo at the start of the race, just before Turn 1," the stewards said. "The resulting collision
caused a chain reaction upfront.
"Although this was a lap one incident, where some leeway is given to the drivers who get caught up in the middle of a number of cars, this particular incident was not one of those. Here, Zhou got off to a slow start and simply did not slow down enough when approaching the corner, resulting in an unnecessary collision."
Speaking at race end, Zhou admitted that he was at a loss to explain what happened.
"I have no idea, I need to have a look," he said. "I was holding the revs before the four lights and then I just lost all the response from the throttle, so I started basically with zero throttle.
"Really disappointed," he continued, "because I think it could be really good at that point at the start.
"We need to see more in detail what happens there because this is strange, it never happens before at all. I tried to recover before the five lights, tried to go full throttle, but nothing was happening unfortunately, so I had to do a pull-away.
"So my start was actually a pull-away, it wasn't actually a start. That's why you saw my car wasn't moving."
Asked about the first corner mayhem, he said: "I was trying to obviously brake as late as I could to try to gain some positions back, but then partly to the dirty air of the cars ahead unfortunately I locked up into them. So not what I wanted, but the race was pretty much over after the line for me."
Unfortunately, the incident also impacted teammate Bottas who had to take avoiding action at the first corner, dropping to 12th in the process.
Check out our Sunday gallery from the Hungaroring here.