How Giovinazzi’s Spanish GP was ruined by unusual F1 tyre deflation

The Alfa Romeo driver was called in for a stop on Lap 8 of 66 but suffered a significant delay in the pits after one of his mechanics discovered that a medium tyre about to be fitted to the car was already deflated.

Despite Giovinazzi’s crew’s best efforts, getting another set of tyres ready cost him a huge chunk of time and he subsequently dropped from 15th to 19th when he finally re-emerged.

Explaining the rare issue that Sky Sports F1 co-commentator Martin Brundle said he had “never seen before”, Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering, Xevi Pujolar, revealed that a damaged valve led to the tyre losing pressure in the garage.

“It was an operational problem when just picking up the set at one point when getting everything ready in the garage that damaged the valve,” Pujolar said.

“We have got a monitoring system and it was OK when the race started, but at some point in the garage it then went wrong, we think a couple of laps before the pitstop.

“It is an area we can improve that will not happen [again]. We should have been able to recover because it was a Safety Car. If we didn’t have the problem with the dash, I think we were pretty much there at the back of the group.

“We wanted to have the two mediums. With that strategy, I think he would have been fighting for the points because he would have been very well positioned.”

The problem led to Giovinazzi being forced to run a scrubbed set of soft tyres for his final stint, having originally planned to switch onto a fresh set of mediums.

“After that happened, my race was just compromised,” Giovinazzi said. “Nothing happened in the front as well.

“That set [of tyres], I didn’t have the possibility to use again, so we lost one set of mediums. Yeah, just a shit race. The pace was not bad, we just lost the race really soon.

“To lose all this time and a new set of tyres was a blow, especially as I had to follow the delta behind the Safety Car and couldn’t catch up to the pack.”