The Japanese Grand Prix is Jack Doohan’s fourth appearance as a Formula 1 race driver.
As opportunities to test and practice are so limited, it therefore came as a surprise when Alpine announced he would not take part in the first practice session this weekend. The team wanted to run its test driver Ryo Hirakawa at his home event, and chose to bench the rookie rather than his team mate Pierre Gasly, who will start his 156th grand prix on Sunday.
Asked on Thursday whether the team’s decision would put him at a disadvantage, Doohan diplomatically toed the PR line. “In China, a similar situation and I only had 40 minutes before that [power unit] issue in the end and then we still did a solid sprint quali and qualifying.”
This was true, but Shanghai’s circuit is a totally different prospect to Suzuka. The Chinese track is wide with vast run-offs, while Suzuka is narrow, has far more quick corners and the run-off is very limited in places.
Doohan admitted that “on paper, it looks more difficult and it sounds more difficult.” It certainly looked and sounded more difficult when he suffered a monumental crash early in the second practice session.
He was only on his second attempt at a flying lap when his car snapped out of control as he turned into Suzuka’s fearsomely fast and unimpressively named turn one, which he approached at around 330kph. He made a heavy impact with the six-deep tyre barrier on the outside, ripping the left-rear portion of his A525 to pieces.
Mercifully, Doohan emerged unscathed. Indeed, he was well enough to ask his race engineer three times before he got out of the car what had caused him to lose control. Sparing his blushes, his engineer Josh Peckett replied: “We’re just looking at everything on our side here.”
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But as the footage from his car showed, Doohan hadn’t deactivated his DRS as he headed into the corner. There was no way to put this down to anything besides driver error. “It was a misjudgement of not closing the DRS into turn one,” team principal Oliver Oakes confirmed in a statement hours after practice had finished.
Rookies are inevitably more susceptible to crashing than experienced drivers. All six drivers who embarked on their first full seasons this year have already bent an F1 car at least once.
At a track like Suzuka it makes sense to give them every chance possible to build up to the limit. Alpine was the only team who deprived their rookie of an hour’s running on one of F1’s most punishing courses.
It’s not hard to see why Alpine wanted to grab the opportunity to run their Japanese test driver at his home track. But this could just as easily have been achieved using Gasly’s car.
Moreover, had Alpine swapped Hirakawa with Gasly instead, it would have helped them meet the FIA-imposed requirement to give practice opportunities to inexperienced drivers. Each team must run “a driver who has not participated in more than two championship races in their career” twice in each of their cars during the season.
Alpine had already fulfilled this requirement on Doohan’s car before reaching Suzuka, as he had not yet started his third race when he took part in first practice in Shanghai. RaceFans has asked the team why it made this decision.
Long before Doohan started his first season of F1, rumours surfaced that he would not see it out, and be replaced by the likes of Franco Colapinto. This has frustrated Alpine, who claimed the speculation around its driver was “not fair.” But the strange decision they took at Suzuka is only going to add more fuel to that fire.
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