Latifi doesn’t understand his off-track excursion during the safety car
Nicholas Latifi showed himself this weekend during a low-speed off-track excursion, while the safety car was out. An incident that the Canadian himself cannot explain.
Author of a rather poor start to the season, far behind the other 19 drivers on the grid, Nicholas Latifi had not made any notable mistakes for several weekends. This Sunday in Monaco, the rain came to disrupt the race plans just minutes before the start.
And during the early laps under the safety car regime, two drivers got caught right away: Lance Stroll and… Nicholas Latifi, the two Canadians. The Williams driver hit the wall at low speed in the Fairmont hairpin, one of the slowest corners on the calendar. He reflected on this rather embarrassing incident after the race. « I’m still trying to figure out what happened, » he says. « I know I didn’t do anything wrong there. I just turned, the accelerator wasn’t stuck but it felt like it was. »
Latifi therefore believes that he did not make any mistakes at that moment. « It was very, very strange. Something went wrong. […] Once again, I know I didn’t do anything wrong, I was almost stationary in that turn anyway. It was very unfortunate, the damage afterwards, we were out of sequence even before the start of the race. »
The Canadian is still looking for an explanation. « I know it wasn’t the accelerator pedal itself, I know it was something that reset the engine. I started getting pushed by the engine. I wasn’t afraid that the pedal would happen again, it wasn’t the pedal. The car was running and I wasn’t on the gas, so I don’t know what happened. It was very strange. »
Passenger or actor in this rather embarrassing off-track incident in everyone’s eyes, this is not the way Nicholas Latifi should be going about trying to convince Williams to keep him for 2023, especially knowing his seat is in jeopardy.
