Fernando Alonso: It was a dangerous moment.…

      Fernando Alonso has been in Formula 1 for his 22nd season, and his World Championship debut took place almost a quarter of a century ago, and it would seem that during this time the two-time world champion had to be in a variety of situations. Nevertheless, yesterday he had to experience something that had never happened to him before.

      During the second training session in Bahrain, Fernando had to return to the pits after two laps on the track because the steering wheel on his Aston Martin was not properly fixed. At some point, it completely detached from the steering column, remained in the hands of the Spaniard, and his AMR25 drove several meters along the side of the road when it was simply impossible to control the car.

      But by this point, Alonso had already slowed down almost completely, somehow put the steering wheel in place, started the car again and was able to get to the pits. Over the radio, he demanded from his engineer: "Change the steering wheel, there's a problem with the steering wheel, nothing is working!"

      For 35 minutes, the mechanics and engineers of the team tinkered with the car, although considering that they had to completely replace the steering column, they coped with this difficult task quite quickly.

      "We have a problem with the steering wheel, which we are trying to solve. After finding out the causes of the malfunction, we are changing several steering elements," the team said at the time.

      And then Fernando himself said: "The steering wheel was not properly fixed to the steering column, at some point I could no longer shift gears, and the display on the steering wheel turned off. I couldn't get in touch with the team either, and the steering wheel just disconnected at the last turn. As a result, we realized that some kind of problem was probably related to the steering column.

      The mechanics quickly replaced several parts, after which everything worked. In general, it was a dangerous moment, but I am grateful to everyone who works in the garage for repairing the car."

      With 25 minutes left in the session, Alonso returned to the track, although the team had to significantly reduce his training program. And he didn't participate in the first session at all, because Felipe Drugovich, Aston Martin's reserve driver, was driving his car. In the end, Fernando clocked 15th, taking the lead by 1.32 seconds, but he was still ahead of his teammate, Lance Stroll.

      "To be honest, I think we can still improve, we have to do this, including through the optimal tuning of the car,– the Spanish newspaper AS quoted Mike Krak, racing director of Aston Martin, as saying. – There is always a potential for this. We always say that our task is to prevent the car from showing its real capabilities as little as possible. By fine-tuning, it is always possible to ensure that riders are more confident in braking before cornering."