Blow for under-fire Jack Doohan; new power unit fitted after practice failure

Alpine had to fit a new power unit on Jack Doohan’s Formula 1 car after he ran into technical issues in Friday practice for the Chinese Grand Prix.

With about 15 minutes remaining in the session, Doohan missed a corner and complained about “no power steering” as he parked his car outside the track in a run-off area.

A red flag was deployed to assist the recovery of his car, with the Australian forced to miss the remainder of the session.

However, despite the short window between the sole practice session of the weekend and sprint qualifying, Alpine was able to send Doohan back out on track for SQ1.

FIA documents reveal that Doohan got a new internal combustion engine, turbocharger, MGU-H, MGU-K, as well a new exhaust prior to the grid-deciding shootout.

No penalty was incurred as he hadn’t exceeded the maximum allocation for any of those power unit elements, or the exhaust system on his A525.

Doohan was able to recover from the setback, which had left him at the bottom of the timesheets in FP1, to qualify 16th for the sprint race in Shanghai, one place ahead of teammate Pierre Gasly.

The 22-year-old has been facing intense pressure to justify his seat ever since it was announced that he would join Alpine as a full-time driver to replace Haas-bound Esteban Ocon.

The Enstone-based squad already has Franco Colapinto in its roster as a reserve driver should Doohan not be able to live up to its expectations.

Team principal Oliver Oakes admitted that Alpine is partly responsible for the scrutiny Doohan is facing this year, but is confident he will be able to come back stronger after his opening lap crash in wet-weather conditions at last weekend's Australian GP.

“There's the aspect of we want to have a good line-up, also want to have some good drivers in the pipeline,” said Oakes. “And I think by doing that, we obviously created a little bit of noise around him.

“But credit to him that he's got down to business as soon as the season started, and the job he did in Australia was brilliant. Obviously, we saw a couple of people getting caught out on Sunday with the conditions, but that's to be expected when you're a rookie.

“He just needs to dust himself off and go again, which this morning he did a good job straight away. A little bit of a frustration there with a failure at the end, but he was doing a good start to the weekend again.”