Williams forced to call it a day after Nicholas Latifi fire

Nicholas Latifi, FW44, Fire — Photo: © LAT Images

Williams

Williams forced to call it a day after Latifi fire

Latifi's Williams caught fire during the Friday morning session

Sam Hall

Friday 11 March 2022 14:12

Nicholas Latifi will take no further part in pre-season testing on Friday after confirming an earlier fire has "parked" the team for the day.

Latifi endured a difficult morning of the final F1 test in Bahrain after a brake failure and resulting fire limited the Canadian to just 12 laps.

Revealing the team would use the four-hour afternoon session to "assess" the damage, Latifi said: “We won’t be out for the rest of the day, unfortunately.

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"They’re still trying to assess what actually the damage was and really just taking their time to do it because especially with fire, you want to make sure that cars might not look physically damaged as in a crash but, of course, they can be.

“We’re just taking our time to go through it, assessing it and will try to get back out for tomorrow.

“Today is, unfortunately, parked.”

Latifi's incident, which caused the session to be red flagged, was made more dramatic by a sudden explosion as a marshall attempted to douse the flames.

“We’re still not 100 per cent but the best guess is that it was the tyre popping off the rim," explained Latifi.

“I think, from my opinion, it probably looked more of an explosion than it actually was. I think the explosion was more the air dissipating the smoke that was already there.

“I think that made it just seem more dramatic than it actually was.”

He added: “To be honest, when I looked at it from being up close, it didn’t look worse than what I initially thought it was, especially when seeing everything back in the garage and I caught up with them obviously starting to go through the parts."