Pierre Gasly bashes FIA: “I am compromising my health”
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Pierre Gasly
The 2022 Azerbaijan Grand Prix saw the double DNF of Ferrari followed by Max Verstappen securing a commanding victory. He was followed by his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez and Red Bull had a huge haul of points. However, the fact that Ferrari’s reliability issues might cost Leclerc a potential world championship was not the only topic that brought heated discussions with it. The most talked about thing this weekend was something that teams have been trying to solve since the start of the season, that is, porpoising.
Ever since the first session of the Azerbaijan Race Weekend, fans could see just how much the cars were bouncing up and down on a long straights of the Baku City Circuit. During the race, seven time world champion Lewis Hamilton kept on getting on the radio to his engineer to complain about how much his back was killing him due to the vibrations caused by the porpoising.
After the race, fans spotted that Hamilton was struggling to get out of the car due to the immense pain that he was feeling in his lower back. Even after getting out of the car, he was seen holding his back. This raised questions on how safe it is for the drivers to keep on driving these cars that are having a huge toll on their health.
Alpha Tauri driver Pierre Gasly commented on this issue
When Pierre Gasly was asked to share his opinions on the propoising problem that has been plaguing all the racers, he said, “Sometimes the car is moving on its own, just because the steering is shaking. At such speed, it’s not easy. I don’t think they can fix something until the end of the year.”
Pierre Gasly continued and explained that at this point it is a balance between performance and health as the teams can stop the porpoising if they want to but it would come at the cost of performance on track.
“It’s not healthy, that’s for sure. I’ve had a physio session before and after every session, just because my [spinal] discs are suffering from it. The team is asking me, ‘OK, we can compromise the set-up?’ and I’m compromising my health for the performance”
Pierre Gasly went on, “And I’ll always do it, because I’m a driver and I always go for the fastest car I can. But I don’t think FIA should put us in a corner where you gotta deal between health and performance.”
The issue is still being hotly debated as some people, like Pierre Gasly himself, believe that the FiA should step in and help out the drivers, while the other group of people believe that if porpoising is this big of an issue then the teams should be ready to lose some performance to fix it and then try to gain back that performance by engineering other methods.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)