Red Bull boss Christian Horner divulged upon the technical glitches that triggered pit-stop drama for his team during the Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix.
Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda were both delayed by several seconds during their opening stops at the Bahrain International Circuit when Red Bull’s traffic light system failed to signal the drivers ‘Green’ to go roaring down pit road.
After Verstappen experienced the issue first time around, Red Bull assumed it was just a button triggering the system that wasn’t engaged properly, but when Tsunoda encountered the same problem, Horner explained his squad switched to a manual override.
“Max came in for the first stop and the light didn’t do anything,” Horner told select media, including Motorsport Week.
“It’s a very simple system that we expected the button hadn’t been pressed hard enough by one of the technicians, and the next pit stop was within one minute, and then it happened again.
“At that point we went into a manual override on the system and the chief mechanic released the car.”
But what was the cause?
“I’ve just heard that there was some kind of wiring or electrical issue with the gantry,” Horner revealed.
“It’s one I certainly haven’t seen before. The drivers live by those traffic lights and the actual stops were pretty good; one of them was a two-second stop. But then the driver’s waiting for the lights and then obviously it didn’t go out.
“Everything’s gone into quarantine and we’ll have a good look at it.”
Sluggish Red Bull stops below usual standards
Compounding Red Bull’s issues was a sticking right front wheel on Verstappen’s second stop, which lengthened his stay in the pit-box to 6.2s.
This made a bad day worse, where Red Bull encountered brake issues, on top of it’s usual problems with through-corner balance and tyre degradation.
Asked how he felt about the pit-stop drama, Verstappen replied, “Not good, of course, waiting for so long and two separate problems, so not to our standards.”
The Dutchman added, “the pace was very bad, but of course I didn’t expect the race that I had, because basically everything went wrong that could go wrong. That probably made it a little bit worse.”
Horner concurred with this assessment, saying “we’ve been struggling with two issues this weekend, one a braking issue and secondly just an imbalance, and when you have that then tyre deg etc, everything looks worse.
“On top of that we’ve had a horrible day where we had what looks like a wiring loom issue in the pit gantry has caused there to be a problem with the traffic light,” he concluded.
Procedural issues should be the least of Horner’s concerns, given Red Bull’s significant pace problems that restricted Verstappen to a sixth-place finish, a result the Dutchman called “the maximum that we could have done.”
The significance of the problems at Red Bull was pointed out to Sky Germany by senior advisor Helmut Marko, who said, “The concern is great,” when referring to holding onto the team’s star driver.
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