Australian Grand Prix 2014: Were Reliability Concerns a Fuss over Nothing?

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: March 19, 2014

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Throughout winter testing, the buzzword in Formula One was reliability. As we approached the Australian Grand Prix, a number of teams still hadn't completed race distances.

All of them had experienced multiple problems during testing and none could say with confidence that both cars would get to the end.

Team personnel, media, experts and fans alike weighed in with their thoughts. Those saying we might have no finishers were going a little bit too far, but the realistic predictions being thrown around were that a finish might be enough for points.

In the end, it was 21 December 2012 all over again. The doom-mongers were wrong, the squib was a damp one, the apocalypse was not now.

A total of 15 cars were still running at the chequered flag. They including the later-disqualified Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo and Jules Bianchi's Marussia, which was so far behind it wasn't classified.

Of the seven retirements, six were due to car failures. Kamui Kobayashi, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Pastor Maldonado, Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson.

So it was all a fuss over nothing?



Not quite.

That figure of 15 looks good, but it could easily have been much lower. Max Chilton's engine decided to turn itself off at the start of the formation lap, and Jules Bianchi's did the same thing on the starting grid.

Both got going from the pit lane, but the two Marussias were only a whisker away from being the first retirements of the race with mechanical failures.

Also struggling were the Ferraris. The chassis technical director Pat Fry said on the team's website:

Today we saw how reliability can never be taken for granted: it caught some people out and it also affected our performance at some stages of the race. On both the F14 Ts, we had some electrical problems, especially on Kimi’s car, which meant he couldn't use all the car’...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Formula 1

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