With more than 20 races being held in a championship season, it is obvious that car failure and shunts can ruin a driver’s season more than their rivals on the grid. In 2022, this was the case with Alpine’s Fernando Alonso who suffered 6 DNFs over the season.
Alonso’s misfortunes were one of the highlights of the 2022 season as he publicly spoke about them to the media. towards the end of the season, the Spaniard said, “It’s amazing that only 1-2 cars retire at every race and it’s always car number 14.”
The same was not the case at the other end of Alpine’s garage. The 2-time world champion’s teammate Esteban Ocon did not encounter the same problems as Alonso.
But with 20 drivers on the grid, were there other drivers who suffered luck worse than Alonso or maybe similar to him?
Racefans.net analysed all of the races of the 2022 season to find other drivers who were as ill-served as Alonso.
DNF 🥲 de @alo_oficial @AlpineF1Team #GPMexico #F1ESTA #Alonso pic.twitter.com/HddsTBvv5b
— krivalwer (@krivalwer1) October 31, 2022
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5 drivers who suffered the same fate as Fernando Alonso
1. Kevin Magnussen – Haas
Kevin Magnussen made a strong return to F1 in the 2022 season with the Haas F1 team. He scored multiple points for the team and outperformed his teammate Mick Schumacher on multiple occasions.
But his impressive run soon turned around when he started facing technical issues and multiple PU problems. He took 3 PU grid penalties and suffered to DNFs due to car failure. Over the season his retirement rate was 22.7%.
2. Yuki Tsunoda – AlphaTauri
The Japanese driver is no stranger to retirements and shunts during races. But apart from the retirements that came due to his own fault, he was also pretty unfortunate in the 2022 season.
Such as, in Baku, his DRS failed while was running for a good result. On top of that, he suffered 5 power unit grid penalties and he had to retire twice due to car failure.
Tsunoda’s overall retirement rate was 23.8% in the 2022 season.
3. Pierre Gasly – AlphaTauri
Tsunoda’s teammate Gasly too suffered some unique misfortunes over the season. One infamous example came when the Frenchman was denied the opportunity to run in Q3 at the Red Bull Ring. This was because Red Bull’s Sergio Perez was allowed in the final phase despite having an illegal lap time.
Another misfortune came when he hit an advertising board after Carlos Sainz had hit the barriers at a drenched race in Suzuka.
Gasly suffered 3 PU grid penalties and 2 retirements due to contact. His retirement rate in 2022 was 13.6%.
4. Fernando Alonso – Alpine
Alonso’s bad lucks were not just confined to the race days. He suffered problems with his car even before the lights went out on the race days.
Sometimes he’d crash with some driver and suffer damage. On other occasions, he would face problems such as electronic control unit failure or hydraulics failure when he is in the battle for the front row. No wonder, the Spaniard was left frustrated by his 2022 season.
He suffered 3 Pu grid penalties and 5 retirements due to car failure. His retirement rate was 27.3% over the season.
5. Valtteri Bottas – Alfa Romeo
Unlike other drivers, Bottas had to sit out most of his practice sessions due to car problems. The Finnish would take the poor reliability issues on Friday to not affect his race days on Sunday but it still affected him on a couple of occasions.
Although, as the season progressed, Alfa Romeo began to find a solution for their poor reliability which helped him hold on to P6 in the constructors’ championship.
He suffered 3 PU grid penalties and 4 retirements due to car failure. His retirement rate in the 2022 season was similar to Alonso’s at 27.3%.
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