As a part of its return to the F1 calendar following an inaugural occasion in 2021, Qatar race organisers have undertaken an enormous overhaul of the Lusail venue.
On high of an entire resurfacing, the primary time that has occurred for the reason that venue was inbuilt 2004, all of the kerbs across the observe have been revised.
This was initially considered as a Positive step, as a result of again on the 2021 Qatar Grand Prix there have been a spate of issues attributable to kerbs inflicting punctures for drivers.
Within the race, Valtteri Bottas, Nicholas Latifi and George Russell all suffered high-profile punctures that post-race investigations pointed to being attributable to abuse of the kerbs.
However as drivers acquired their first sighting of the Qatar upgrades forward of this weekend’s occasion, considerations have emerged that the brand new answer launched could possibly be even worse.
Tsunoda says his entire workforce is nervous that the brand new kerb design is much too aggressive for the present technology of floor impact automobiles, which run very near the bottom so are prone to break on raised surfaces.
Lusail Worldwide Circuit overview
Picture by: QMMF
Talking on Thursday he declared that Qatar now was a “flooring destroyer observe.”
He added: “It looks like they modified to the aggressive kerbs.
“Right here is all the time a narrative with observe limits, however they made even worse the kerbs as a result of whenever you go over the white line, you’re going to have a correct penalty – which looks like it’ll be a excessive danger to break the automotive.”
Tsunoda defined that the most important situation was the transition between the kerb and the run-off, which left the danger of a automotive operating huge being uncovered to a battering from beneath.
“It’s the step between the kerb and off observe,” he mentioned. “Driving on the kerb received’t be a problem, however when you step out from the kerbs it’ll be like an entire sliding impact.
“It isn’t clean in any respect, and particularly driving right here, with such high-speed corners the place the automotive is admittedly low, it is going to be exhausting. Even one time can be fairly expensive I feel.”
Tsunoda mentioned the primary actuality in regards to the state of the kerbs emerged earlier this week, when his AlphaTauri workforce acquired images of the revised observe.
“I did the simulator on Tuesday, and the images arrived on that day,” he mentioned. “The images had been actually aggressive, and all of the engineers are involved about it.”