The Alfa Romeo driver was called in for a stop on Lap 8 of 66 but suffered a significant delay in the pits after one of his mechanics discovered that a medium tyre about to be fitted to ♎the car was already deflated.

Despite Giovinazzi’s crew’s best eff🌠orts, getting another set of tyres ready cost him a huge chunk of time and he subsequently dropped from 15th to 19th when he finally r🥀e-emerged.

Explaining the rare issue that Sky Sports F1 co-commentator Martin Brundle said he had “never seen before”, Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering, Xevi Pujolar, revealed that a damaged valve led to the tyre🍌 losing pressure in the garage.

“It was an operational problem when just picking up the set at one point when ge𝔉tting every♔thing ready in the garage that damaged the valve,” Pujolar said.

“We have got a monitor🍃ing system and it was OK when the race started, but at some point in the garage it then went wrong, we think a couple of laps before the pitstop.

“It is an area we can improve that will not ha🎀ppen [again]. We should have been able to recover because it was🦩 a Safety Car. If we didn’t have the problem with the dash, I think we were pretty much there at the back of the group.

“We wanted to have ꦆthe two mediums. With that strategy, I think he would have been fightiඣng for the points because he would have been very well positioned.”

The problem led to Giovinazzi being forced to run a scrubbed s💛et of soft tyr💧es for his final stint, having originally planned to switch onto a fresh set of mediums.

“After that happened, my race was just compromise💙d,” G🐲iovinazzi said. “Nothing happened in the front as well.

“That set [of tyres], I didn’t have the possibility to use again, so we lost one set of mediums. Yeah, just a shit raceꦅ. The pace was not bad, we just lost the race really soon.

“To lose all this time and a new set of tyres was a bloไw, especially as I had to follow the delta behind the Safety Car and couldn’t catch up to the pack.”