AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda claimed that traffic problems caused by the outage of GPS data was a factor in his spin into the gravel during FP1 at the 2023 Australian Grand Prix.
Tsunoda spun at Turns 1 and 2 in spectacular fashion, failing to slow down as he approached Turn 1, which allowed his AT04 to send him bouncing over the gravel and grass.
The session had a multitude of close calls as teams were unable to view the GPS data which would usually allow them to inform the drivers of the location of their rivals on the track, with the session later being red-flagged by race control until the issue was resolved.
The subsequent traffic problems, when the drivers switched their hard tyres for soft, led to Charles Leclerc having a close encounter with Pierre Gasly while Zhou Guanyu almost made contact with Sergio Perez and Lance Stroll.
“There was massive traffic,” Tsunoda said.
“[A] bit of chaos caused from GPS [being[ off I would say and slowed down a lot in the last sector.
“The tyre was just not ready at all and as soon as I turn out I just didn’t have any grip.”
“A difficult FP1, struggling [with the] rear. FP2 was okay. Quite happy with the FP2 performance, we just did a hard tyre [and] we did a soft run pretty much [like] everyone but we don’t know exactly where we are”
When asked about his hopes for qualifying Tsundoa said: “I think it will be really tight as usual. Hopefully, we can, we are aiming for Q3 but first of all Q2 and we see how it goes.”
