Around the halfway mark of a sweltering Losail race, Alonso urged the team to come up with a solution after feeling a burning pain in his seat.
“The seat is burning, mate,” he said on the team radio. “Anything we can do at the pit stop? Throw me water or something!”
The team couldn’t do much to provide some relief for the Spaniard, but afterwards team principal Mike Krack explained the burning seat is a recurring theme that it is trying to fix, and it was exacerbated by Qatar’s extreme heat.
“Yes, it’s true. He reported on it already a couple of times,” Krack said when asked if the issue had occurred before.
“We were working on it. And it’s not that we have not done anything. We had it also in Singapore, which we thought was much, much better.
“But then obviously, we have another set of extreme conditions, so I think we’re not far from air conditioning if it continues like that.”
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin F1 Team, Lando Norris, McLaren, on the grid
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
When asked why the AMR23’s seat gets so hot, Krack said: “You have hydraulic lines, you have ECUs around you. They’re all heating up, and you try to isolate the seat from it.
“But also, you do not want to have any kind of active cooling because it’s just weight.”
Alonso revealed that the burning sensation on the right-hand side of the seat already started occurring within the first 15 laps.
“I think for Lance and myself we struggled a little bit with temperature in the seat on the right-hand side,” Alonso said.
“I got a burn in the first 15 laps, so I even asked on the radio if they could throw me some water or something at the pitstop, which apparently is not allowed. So yeah, it was quite extreme.
“We have been dealing with some issues [before]. Today was extreme.”
Alonso likened the conditions at Losail, which almost caused team-mate Stroll to faint and forced Williams’ Logan Sargeant to retire with a heatstroke, to a Dakar Rally test he completed with Toyota in August 2019.
“I had a test here with Nasser in August before Qatar and it was similar to today,” the two-time world champion added. “Qatar always in this time of the year is quite extreme.”
Despite the seat issues and an off-track excursion, the Spaniard persisted to finish sixth, while Stroll dropped out of the points after repeated track limits penalties.
Additional reporting by Adam Cooper