Honda has said that the loss in power that caused Alonso to abort his final Q2 lap was caused by the computer getting confused after he took Pouhon flat.
But he aborted the lap when the Hoda engine didn’t deploy the extra energy it should have on the straight.
As such he was knocked out of the session and ended 11th.
The problem was to do with the algorithm that runs the energy deployment of the engine.
It works by detecting major throttle input to detect where it is on track, so a big lift off the throttle tells the system it is going through a corner and so it doesn’t release the deployment energy. When the throttle is pressed again it knows it on a straight and so releases the energy.
But when Alonso went through Pouhon flat out (instead of lifting off like he had on previous laps) the system though he hadn’t gone through the corner and was still on the run down from the previous corner.
It, therefore, did not release the deployment when it should have and cost Alonso around half a second.
“We set a segment to when we have the deployment, and normally that segment is divided by the throttle,” Yusuke Hasegawa told Motorsport.com.
“Sometimes a driver is making a different operation, so that makes the system confused and we didn’t have deployment at some certain area.”
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