Alonso suffering steering problems!

By role
May 31 2004

Fernando Alonso had a difficult race yesterday. He was one of the drivers to benefit from the incident of Takuma Sato and Jarno Trulli at turn 3 and was running third behind the McLaren of Kimi Raikkonen at the end of the first lap.

Unfortunately, Raikkonen was blocking him during most of the first laps while Michael Schumacher was taking a comfortable lead that would not abandon.

Things were going to get worse since after the first pit stop Alonso was stuck behind the Jordan of Nick Heidfield. Alonso was pushing the German when a problem in his steering rack made him run wide. The problem remained on the car for most of the race making it impossible for the Spaniard to challenge for the podium.

However, Alonso was not disappointed taking under consideration that he was not planning to finish the race because of the problems with his car:

“With a broken car to finish 5th I should not be disappointed, but it I true we have miss on a good chance to be on the podium.” He said. “I thought I could end up on the podium from the start when I was running third and was much faster than Raikkonen. But I had bad luck once again and even with that bad luck I was able to finish again and to pick up points.”


Alonso explained the problems on his car:

“The steering wheel became blocked on the horizontal position, going straight. When you turned left it was fine, but when you turned right it blocked. On the fast chicane, that you go through on fifth gear at 200 km/h, the car continued straight and I was afraid of going off, but I did not want to retire from the race. I was trying to finish and I did my best.” He said. “As soon as I experienced the problem I was going to kill the engine. Then suddenly the steering came back again and I thought about trying for two turns. From there on it was 50 laps with the problem.”

”The problem with the steering rack we have it since 6 months ago. It blocks in some place, but we do not know where. I started to feel it after coming out of my first pit stop, on the first turn.” He added. “Trulli passed me because of it and it happened in several laps so I lost quite a lot of time.”