After much anticipation, the first run on F1’s fancy new Las Vegas Grand Prix course has ended poorly. After just eight minutes of running, Carlos Sainz Jr.’s Ferrari sucked a manhole cover off the ground, damaging his car, Esteban Ocon’s Alpine F1 car, and ending the practice session early.
Worse still, the incident will have a big impact on Carlos Sainz’s race, as the damage from the manhole cover forced Ferrari to replace his car’s power unit. Since he has already used his allocation of those for the season, he will receive a 10-place grid penalty on race day. It likely won’t come as any consolation to the driver that F1’s stewards seem apologetic about handing him a penalty under these unusual circumstances.
“The stewards note that if they had the authority to grant a derogation in what they consider in this case to be mitigating, unusual and unfortunate circumstances, they would have done so, however the regulations do not allow such action,” they wrote in their decision. “Accordingly, the mandatory penalty specified […] must be applied.”
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For Esteban Ocon, the damage will have shorter-term implications. Although his Alpine F1 car’s chassis was damaged in the incident and had to be replaced, per F1, no penalties appear to have been issued to the French driver.
Issues with drainage covers are nothing new in F1. In its first year, a manhole cover was sucked off the ground at the Baku Grand Prix, in Azerbaijan. The sport does require that such infrastructure elements be welded (or otherwise secured) to the ground for street races, but in this case, F1 found that it was the concrete around the manhole cover that failed.
Naturally, the sport canceled running for the rest of the practice session in order to better secure other covers to the ground and to repair the one that Sainz collided with.
Fortunately, it appears the driver will have a quick car to fight his back to the front with this weekend. When running started again for the second practice session of the weekend, he finished the session in second place, behind teammate Charles Leclerc.
The moment Carlos Sainz hit a drain cover on the Las Vegas strip, causing FP1 to be cancelled 👀 pic.twitter.com/KIMbuZoteY
— ESPN F1 (@ESPNF1) November 17, 2023