LONDON (Reuters) – Formula One teams were reunited with their cars and equipment on Thursday after being stranded for days in China by flight chaos caused by ash from an Icelandic volcano.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, who flew home to Britain after a ‘five stop strategy’, taking in Dubai, Rome, Nice and Glasgow before a final helicopter trip south, said the sport would take the disruption in its stride.
“Thankfully, the way the calendar is with the extra week between the Chinese and Spanish Grand Prix, it has a very limited impact,” he told the team website (www.redbullracing.com).
“There’s still over a week to turn the cars around and a lot of the components for the next race are produced here in the factory.”
“The factory hasn’t been affected. Obviously the turnaround components are a little bit out of synch now, coming back two or three days late, but with the additional week we’re confident it won’t cause us any major issues.”
The Spanish Grand Prix is in Barcelona on May 9.
Horner, who arrived home on Tuesday with Australian driver Mark Webber after Sunday’s race in Shanghai, said the rest of the team were due back on Thursday with the planes transporting the race cars expected a few hours earlier.
He said the only hitch to his travels was when Webber discovered on arrival in Scotland that he had forgotten his passport.
Some 55 Lotus team members, plus media and other F1 personnel, arrived back in Britain late on Wednesday — thankful that the Malaysian team’s principal Tony Fernandes also runs his own Air Asia airline.
Others were less fortunate, however.
A Force India spokeswoman, still in Shanghai and contacted by Reuters, said most of that team were still waiting for a flight out.
“Our drivers got out on Tuesday, so they are sorted,” she added. “(British test driver) Paul (Di Resta) is racing in the DTM (in Germany this weekend) so it was a bit more critical for him to get back.”
“The majority of the team are flying back on a charter expected to be leaving at some point tomorrow,” she added.
Formula One’s commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone, who has the advantage of a private jet, appeared to have been the clear winner of what some have dubbed the ‘Volcanic Grand Prix’ to get home first.
“Predictably Bernie beat all of us back,” said Horner, whose German driver Sebastian Vettel got a lift with Ecclestone to Istanbul before catching another plane to Nice.
“I phoned him from Glasgow, very proud that we’d landed on British soil, only for him to say that he’d already been in the office for three hours.”
