By taking Pouhon corner flat out in his McLaren-Honda during last weekend’s Belgian GP qualifying session, Fernando Alonso inadvertently caused his car to give up on him.
After getting a nice tow from his teammate Stoffel Vandoorne on the back straight during his final lap in Q2, Alonso’s McLaren-Honda failed to produce any extra power between Pouhon and Fagnes.
According to Autosport, the lack of boost didn’t happened because the car failed, but because Honda’s system got confused about where the car was on the track, since the deployment algorithm is calculated through throttle input.
By taking Pouhon flat out for the first time all weekend during Q2, Alonso tricked his car’s electronics into thinking that he hadn’t gone through the corner yet. This meant that no extra energy was deployed, leaving the McLaren with insufficient power on its way towards Fagnes chicane.
Honda F1 chief Yusuke Hasegawa went on to say that his company would likely have to change its procedures in order to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.
“We set a segment to when we have the deployment, and normally that segment is divided by the throttle. Sometimes a driver is making a different operation, so that makes the system confused and we didn’t have deployment at some certain area.”
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