The Lotus Formula 1 team were the victims of a huge fire that tore through their hospitality unit at last weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix.
The fire started early on Saturday morning at around 3am and destroyed catering equipment, food and drink, marketing materials and even one of the helmets of 2007 F1 world champion Kimi Raikkonen.
The blaze caused quite a stir in the Sepang circuit’s paddock area, but fortunately no one was inside the unit when the fuse on a refrigerator blew causing a fire in the kitchen area.
The team had help from others including the Marussia team to set up a new hospitality suite in the paddock for the remainder of the race weekend.
In a blog on the Lotus F1 website, a spokesperson said, “The team would like to thank our counterparts from up and down the paddock, who have been incredibly supportive in offering help and facilities to get us through the weekend. While the competition on track may be as fierce as ever, but times like these are a reminder that as a sport, we are very much a community.”
It emerged over the course of the weekend that the fire could have been easily avoided.
Williams F1 wrote on their Facebook page that Lotus had been complaining to officials that the fridge was faulty.
They wrote, “what really hurt was the knowledge that the team had asked someone from the circuit to check the fridge earlier in the day because it had repeatedly tripped their fuse box.”
Raikkonen, nicknamed the iceman, appeared to be unshaken by the fire as he kept his cool to come back from 10th to finish 5th, while his teammate Romain Grosjean was unlucky to have spun off the track and beached himself early in the race.
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