Ferrari: Las Vegas manhole incident costs 2 million Euros. The Las Vegas manhole incident costs Ferrari 2 million Euros.

The world’s most expensive manhole
Ferrari’s team principal, Frederic Vasseur, was rightfully furious on Thursday night in Las Vegas about what happened to Carlos Sainz’s SF-23, destroyed by the lifting of a manhole that had already broken the frame of Esteban Ocon’s Alpine. The head of the Scuderia Ferrari pit emphasized that no one came to apologize for a certainly unedifying episode, although it was certainly not the first time in the history of the Circus (manholes have caused problems on many other city tracks such as Monaco and Baku, but also on permanent circuits like Sepang in Malaysia).

Scuderia Ferrari thus found itself involuntarily facing a double setback, both of a sporting and financial nature. Carlos Sainz, in fact, had to move back ten positions on the starting grid due to the introduction of the third seasonal battery beyond the two allowed by the regulations. The Scuderia Ferrari, then, cannot avoid including in the budget cap the damages suffered. The passage over a lifted manhole is therefore equated with an accident, as in the case of the setback on the starting grid, the regulations do not provide for any exemption, even at an economic level.

Today’s edition of the Italian newspaper Il Corriere dello Sport reports the ‘mechanic’s bill,’ and it is nothing short of hefty: “Heavy damages have affected the frame, the thermal engine, the oil pump, the battery, the control unit. A loss not only from a technical perspective but also from a sporting and economic perspective, considering that the bill will be no less than two million euros, a strategic amount under the budget cap regime.” A regulatory absurdity that will have to be addressed by the F1 Commission to try not to be decisive for a team when the latter is totally blameless regarding what happened, as in the case of Carlos Sainz and the Maranello team in Las Vegas.