Pierre Gasly will see out the rest of the Barcelona Grand Prix weekend in Alpine’s spare chassis after a worrying moment in Friday’s opening practice left the team unconvinced about the health of his original car.
Late in FP1, Gasly came over the radio with a line no engineer wants to hear at speed around Catalunya: “I think something is broken. I can’t turn forwards.” As he nursed the car back, his follow-up pointed squarely at the suspension. Alpine got him back out for FP2, but the day had already developed that faint smell of compromise — Gasly ended the session 1.8s off Lando Norris’ pace and never looked fully at ease.
Overnight, Alpine chose the cleanest reset available: swap the chassis. That decision came with a cost in manpower and planning, because the work pushed the team into the restricted hours and forced it to burn one of its curfew exemptions.
“The team broke curfew on Friday night for the second time (of four allowed without incurring a penalty) this season to prepare a new chassis from its existing pool for #Car 10 going into the remainder of the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix weekend,” Alpine confirmed.
For Gasly, it’s another twist in a season that’s already had enough of them. He arrived in Spain on a high after learning his Monaco Grand Prix third place had been reinstated once earlier penalties were rescinded — the sort of administrative reprieve that feels like found points in a championship fight. Then, within hours, he’s reporting a front-end that won’t bite and a car that won’t rotate. In modern F1, where the window is narrow and the field is tight, losing even a single session to uncertainty can snowball into a weekend spent chasing balance rather than lap time.
Alpine, at least, is treating it with the seriousness a “can’t turn” message demands. When drivers describe a steering response issue, teams don’t tend to gamble on a quick patch unless the culprit is obvious. A chassis change is blunt, but it’s definitive: eliminate the unknowns, get back to baseline, and stop the weekend from disappearing down a rabbit hole of set-up band-aids.
Alpine wasn’t the only outfit burning the midnight oil in Barcelona. McLaren also declared it would use curfew time, describing its work as “precautionary” in the wake of recent reliability concerns. The team said it would replace “permissible key components” to improve “the robustness of the installation and integration of the power unit” on both Norris and Oscar Piastri’s cars — language that reads like a pre-emptive strike against a problem that hasn’t yet announced itself on the timing screen.
Cadillac, too, was confirmed by the FIA as having personnel within the circuit during the restricted period.
The FIA’s report noted that McLaren, Alpine and Cadillac were present during the 11-and-a-half-hour window that begins at 22:00 and runs to three hours before FP3. Crucially for all three, it was only their second of the four permitted exemptions for the 2026 season, meaning no further action will follow.
That’s the thing about curfew in 2026: it’s less a rigid prohibition than a strategic resource. Teams don’t like spending exemptions in June if they can avoid it — not when the calendar has plenty of flyaways and damage-prone weekends still to come — but when a chassis question hangs over a driver’s confidence, or when reliability paranoia creeps in, you pay the price now to avoid paying a bigger one on Sunday.
For Gasly, the immediate question is how quickly Alpine can get him back to something resembling normality. A new chassis doesn’t automatically mean a quicker car, but it often restores a driver’s trust — and at a circuit like Barcelona, where a stable front end is basically the entry ticket to a decent lap, trust is lap time.
FP3 will tell the story. If Gasly steps into the spare tub and the car responds the way it should, Friday’s scare becomes an asterisk rather than a theme. If it doesn’t, Alpine may find itself with a deeper problem than a single “broken” feeling in practice — and a weekend that started with Monaco relief could tilt sharply back into firefighting mode.
