The first practice session of the Las Vegas Grand Prix was canceled on Thursday just eight minutes in to repair the track after a faulty water valve cover badly damaged Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
The car ultimately left the course on the back of a truck, but the Spaniard was uninjured.
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur said that two-thirds of the car would need to be changed out and called the situation “unacceptable.”
Photo: Reuters
“What Carlos said was he hit something on track and he didn’t know exactly what it was,” Vasseur told reporters. “We completely damaged the monocoque, engine and battery. It’s just unacceptable.”
Alpine said Esteban Ocon’s chassis would also need to be replaced due to suspected damage from the cover, and governing body the FIA said it would check all of the covers along the 6.1km street circuit on the Las Vegas Strip.
Other team principals were quick to defend the brand new course to reporters.
Photo: AP
“These cars are generating huge amounts of suction underneath now,” Williams Racing team principal James Vowles said. “From the picture I saw, it was not something where there was a lack of diligence to it, it was an amount of force they weren’t expecting.”
“I’m confident we’ll get everything sorted, but I don’t think it was at all a case of cutting corners,” Vowles said.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc provisionally topped the time sheet with a lap of 1 minute, 40.909 seconds, followed by the Haas duo of Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was fourth.
The brief first test of the course along the transformed Strip marks F1’s return to Las Vegas for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Fans packed into the stands to see the track in action during its debut were let down as American Logan Sargeant became the only driver who did not make it out on the course during the session.
“Well... that was fun,” the Williams driver wrote on X.
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