Alfa Romeo have explained why Antonio Giovinazzi's pitstop was so slow, after the Italian came in under the Safety Car to switch tyres. Giovinazzi was fitted with a fresh set of tyres, but the mechanic fitting the front left tyre quickly realised that the new tyre was actually punctured. This resulted in a mad scramble for a new one, all while the car was sitting on the jacks in the pitlane. “It was an operational problem when just picking up the set at one point when getting everything ready in the garage that damaged the valve,” Alfa's Xevi Pujolar explained to media, including RacingNews365.com . “We’ve got a monitoring system. It was okay when the race started but, at some point in the garage, then it went wrong, a couple of laps before before the pitstop. “For sure it is an area that we can improve, that shouldn’t happen. But at least we should have been able to recover, because it was a Safety Car." However, a dashboard problem meant that Giovinazzi was forced to obey the delta time rather than rushing to catch up to the back of the pack. This meant that, when the Safety Car withdrew, the Italian was still more than ten seconds behind the pack. "So if then we didn’t have the other problem with the dash, I think we were pretty much there at the back of the group. It’s just that we wanted to have the two mediums, that was the plan with the strategy. “And I think we would have been fighting for the points. Because he would have been very well positioned on what we could do with the tyres with two mediums. But anyway, it is what it is." Giovinazzi was succinct after the race, describing it as 's**t from start to finish'. “After that moment, my race was just compromised, nothing happened in the front as well,” said Giovinazzi. “We lost one set of mediums too, just a shit race. Also, my steering wheel was not working behind the safety car because it was still the delta to follow. So when I started at the green flag I was 10 seconds behind.”
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