Giovinazzi was the first driver to enter the pit lane when Yuki Tsunoda’s failure on the track triggered an early safety car.
However, when the team was preparing to fit a new set of tires, a crew member discovered that one of them was flat.
After a signal to his colleagues, the change was canceled and a second new set of tires had to be fetched from the garage before Giovinazzi could be sent on the journey.
Then he lost time because he had to follow an FIA delta on his dashboard behind the safety car instead of being allowed to join the pack again as usual.
The double delay meant the Italian lost any advantage he could have gained from the strategic move, and he ended up turning 15.
Antonio Giovinazzi, Alfa Romeo Racing in the press conference
Photo by: FIA Pool
“My steering wheel didn’t work behind the safety car because it was still the delta that I had to follow,” said Giovinazzi. “When I started at the green flag, I was 10 seconds behind, so yes – just a shitty race from start to finish.”
Xevi Pujolar, Alfa Romeo’s Head of Track Technology, said the tire set was OK when checked before the start of the race.
“It was an operational problem when I picked up the set at a point when everything was being prepared in the garage that damaged the valve,” he said when asked by Autosport.
“We have a surveillance system. When the race started it was okay, but at one point it went wrong in the pits, a few laps before the pit stop.
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“Of course it’s an area in which we can improve, that shouldn’t happen. But we could at least have recovered because it was a safety car. So if we didn’t have the other problem,” with the dash, me think we were pretty far back in the group edition, we just wanted the two media, that was the plan with the strategy.
“And I think there would have been a fight for the points. Because he would have been very well positioned, which we could do with the tires with two middle tires.
Regarding the safety car dash, he added: “We’re talking to the FIA, we can’t understand why we had this problem. And yes, I don’t know yet. It’s a shame because the time that we lost and we already lost a set of tires and then we lost time that cost him and then he fell in traffic. And that cost him a lot in the race. “
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