If it doesn’t work, but right. In addition to the already weak Pace of Red Bull in Bahrain, there was a problem with boxing equipment on Sunday, which Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda cost further valuable seconds.
Verstappen’s first pit stop lasted 4.7 seconds in round eleven – too long in the tightly pressed front midfield. But Red Bull had no problems changing tires, instead Verstappen just didn’t go off after his finished pit stop.
The reason for this: the pit lights had not granted the Dutchman. Verstappen wanted to start instinctively after jacking up, but stopped again due to the red traffic lights above him. The world champion only started with delay.
“Max came to the first stop and the traffic lights didn’t do anything,” says team boss Christian Horner. “The system is actually very simple. We thought at first, maybe one of the technicians did not press the button firmly enough.”
Only: A round later, exactly the same thing happened at Yuki Tsunoda. Even at the Japanese, the traffic light did not switch to green, so that he also lost valuable time in the box. “The actual stops were actually good,” says Horner. “One was a two-second stop, but the driver was waiting for the green light-but it just couldn’t come.”
Horner: “I’ve never experienced”
Because more pit stops later got lost in the race, Red Bull had to come up with a transition solution: “From that time we went on manual override, and the senior mechanic released the car by hand,” says Horner.
Red Bull wants to investigate exactly what has led to the difficulties. According to a first analysis, it is said to have been a “problem with the cabling or an electrical problem with the pit lights” – whether this is related to the general problems on weekends is also not yet known.
“In any case, I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Horner. “The drivers rely completely on these traffic lights. And now everything is under quarantine and we will analyze it exactly.”