USGP circuit changes demanded after bumps sparked "red alarms"

United States Grand Prix

USGP circuit changes demanded after bumps sparked "red alarms"

Excessive bumps were the talk of the USGP weekend

Ian Parkes & Ewan Gale

Thursday 28 October 2021 16:04

Alpine driver Esteban Ocon feels changes need to be made to the bumpy track surface at the Circuit of the Americas he claims is "on the limit for reliability"

The Frenchman retired from the race with damage to the rear of his car that was possibly caused by the bumps, with others facing a similar fate including team-mate Fernando Alonso.

The track surface caused issues for teams all weekend, with various set-up changes throughout Friday and Saturday needed to ensure the suspension could cope with the harsh conditions.

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Red Bull was even forced to change the rear wings on its cars after a crack was discovered in that on Max Verstappen's RB16B.

Asked if the bumps were acceptable for F1, given the criticism from MotoGP riders earlier in October, Ocon replied: "They are on the limit for reliability.

"A little bit more with a step again in that direction then I think the cars will start to really face issues.

"When you go slow it's not a big problem but once you start going fast, it's big hits on the floor, the suspension.

"The engineers start seeing red alarms, high loads and that's not something we should see. I think it needs some work for next year."

Alpine "didn't expect to struggle that much"

Even before both cars retired, Alpine struggled for pace for the entire weekend which started with Alonso's car grinding to a halt with a water system failure on his very first lap on Friday.

Ocon added: "We obviously didn't expect to struggle as much as that. We had to fight the car through practice, but we did good improvements through every session.

"Qualifying was not as good as we hoped but we improved it a lot from FP1 but in the race a big struggle again so we need to analyse and come back stronger from it.

"It's a track on its own I would say. The track is very rough in comparison to other places, it's quite bumpy, so there are many aspects we will look into."