Nobody was seriously injured in the incident on Tuesday afternoon, with only one person taken to hospital as a precaution, but the infrastructure damage has been high, notably in the garage of WAE (formerly known as Williams Advanced Engineering) where the incident occurred.
But while the flames were confined to the WAE garage following the battery explosion, collateral damage had been caused in the adjacent Mahindra garage as emergency crews tackled the blaze. The damage essentially destroyed the team’s IT systems which were located on that side of the garage, while both cars were in the firing line and threw any further potential running in doubt.
“The side of Edo [Mortara] was quite okay. You had dust, so it was a bit black and everything but nothing dramatic,” team boss Frederic Bertrand exclusively told Autosport.
“But to clean you need to wait until you know what you can do, is it safe. But on the side of Nyck [de Vries] you had the heat, for example the tyres were so hot [they] probably melted a little bit.
“The water they sent or what they used to do the job went everywhere, so the car was quite flooded and then on top of that the dust. It’s everywhere and we need to dismantle the car fully and make sure that everything is cleaned again because the risk you have is maybe it looks okay and then after 20km it’s dead.”
Bertrand admits that once it became clear that de Vries’s car was out of action, thoughts turned to whether it was possible, and worth the effort, to prepare Mortara’s car for any potentially running – which at that stage remained unknown.
Source: Autosport