In a bizarre coincidence, Jerome d’Ambrosio and both Renault drivers, Vitaly Petrov and Nick Heidfeld, all suffered front-suspension failures during first practice in Malaysia.
D’Ambrosio had a spectacular failure which resulted in him taking to the gravel sideways after the suspension on his MVR-02 shattered under braking.
Virgin team principal John Booth was disappointed by the setback it caused, meaning the Belgian failed to complete a single lap in FP2.
“This morning we experienced what we suspect was a suspension failure to the front right of Jerome’s car, which was obviously disappointing,” said Booth.
“The combination of the wheel flailing on its tether and the car ending up in the gravel trap meant that the damage was quite considerable. As the problem occurred just a few minutes before the end of Free Practice 1, we faced a major battle to rebuild.”
Nick Heidfeld’s failure was a little less explosive, unlike his team-mates. The Russian suffered a similar fate to the Virgin driver when his suspension also shattered under braking, ripping the tyre from his car.
The issues at Renault were both put down to a faulty material batch which hadn’t been tested prior to FP1.
“Both Vitaly and Nick suffered failures under braking in the front uprights early in the first session,” explained technical director James Allison.
“As a precaution we stopped running the cars until we had understood the problem. We quickly established that the two failed items had come from the same material batch and that nothing from this batch had run prior to today.
“It took a little longer to rule out other potential causes but once we were confident that the failures were related to a material problem we released the cars for the second half of afternoon practice where they ran without problem.”
Image courtesy of f1photos.eu
