2023-10-09 10:10:35
Monday, October 9, 2023, 10:10
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Everything that could go wrong in Qatar, did go wrong. This weekend, Formula 1 experienced one of those great prizes that will go down in history, and not exactly for the better. Firstly because Max Verstappen was proclaimed three-time world champion in the most unnatural way that exists in the premier motorsport category: in a session called ‘sprint race’ and which takes place on a Saturday. He didn’t even have champagne or a podium to celebrate it because it is not considered a race as such. And on Sunday, the drivers experienced true hell on the Losail circuit. With more than 40 degrees of ambient temperature, the car’s cabin reached “50-60 degrees.” They drove like this for almost two hours. And the consequences were felt instantly: abandonments due to severe dehydration, fainting in the medical center, vomiting… It was the toughest Formula 1 race of the last decade.
The race direction itself and the F1 bosses did not help with their decisions either. Once again, there was trouble with the Pirelli tires. On Saturday they discovered during the sprint session that the wheels were cracking after twenty laps, so they decided to force the drivers on Sunday to change the tires after eighteen laps. What caused that decision? Let everyone go to the limit. And with the temperatures that existed at that time, it was already possible to sense that the pilots would end up exhausted. Carlos Sainz was lucky, he couldn’t get into his Ferrari due to a leak in the gas tank. The man from Madrid saw the suffering of his colleagues from the wall.
During yesterday’s race all kinds of problems occurred. Esteban Ocon vomited inside his helmet and had to complete the next 42 laps under these circumstances. The Frenchman overcame “the toughest race” of his life to finish seventh. Logan Sargeant retired with fifteen laps remaining due to severe dehydration. “There’s no shame in stopping if you feel bad,” his team told him. They had to help him get out of the car. Even Fernando Alonso, who finished sixth, suffered during the race! His seat was “burning” and he begged over the radio for a bucket of ice water to be thrown at him when he stopped in the pits. For security reasons, he did not go to that extreme. But in post-race statements, the Asturian acknowledged that he had lived through hell: «Physically it was a hard race, with quite extreme conditions. “One of the hardest of my career.” And Alonso came to race in Malaysia – a country where similar climatic conditions occur – with the water system broken. The Asturian also took the opportunity to send a message to the ‘bosses’ of the business: “Perhaps, as a sport, we should think about taking some measures for the future if we experience these extreme temperatures again.”
The images captured by the television cameras reflected what the pilots felt. Visors half up on the straights and hands out of the car when they were going 300km/h. The desperation for fresh air was total.
Fainting in the medical center
Many drivers needed help after completing the 57 laps scheduled for yesterday’s race. Albon, Sargeant, Stroll… all of them went through the circuit’s medical center, and some even fainted. Lando Norris told this at a press conference: «Some pilots have fainted in the medical center and that shows how difficult our job is. It’s easy to say that you have to train more. But we were at 50-60ºC inside the car and that is not normal for a human body, much less with the level of concentration that you need at the speeds at which we are going. “There have been times when the vision was a little blurry and it is dangerous.”
Each of the drivers was asked how they experienced the race and the answers were similar. “It was one of the five hardest races of my life,” commented the winner and three-time world champion, Verstappen. «In the last 20-30 laps everything became blurry in front of me and in the high-speed corners the blood pressure dropped suddenly. “It made me dizzy,” confessed Lance Stroll, Fernando Alonso’s teammate.
Next year Formula 1 will return to Qatar to celebrate the third grand prix in the history of the category in the Arab country. But it will do so during the last weekend of November, when temperatures are usually around 30 degrees.
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