Red Bull had no warning that its cars were about to fail towards the end of the Bahrain Grand Prix, according to team boss Christian Horner.
Max Verstappen reported an issue while running in second place after a late Safety Car restart, while team-mate Sergio Perez was two positions behind him.
Verstappen returned to the pit lane a handful of laps before the chequered flag, while Perez retired on the circuit as he began his final lap.
“[The problems were] totally out of the blue,” Horner said. “It’s something we haven’t seen previously.
“We’ll strip the cars, we’ll get into it and understand what the issue was. I suspect it’s something similar between both because the symptoms looked very similar.
“It looks like potentially an issue within the fuel system. So it’s very disappointing to lose 30 points.
“I think the positive side for us was we had a very competitive car. I don’t think we quite had the pace of Charles today but some great racing between max and Charles.
“I think when you look from a season’s perspective, we need to get on top of the issue, whatever it was today and come back next weekend.”
Prior to his Power Unit-related retirement, Verstappen complained of his steering being heavy, which was given him particular bother through high-speed corners.
Horner revealed that the problem arose after the pit stop crew dropped the car during one of the Dutchman’s pit stops.
“We bent a track rod when the car got dropped at the final pit stop and that made the car inconsistent from left to right,” Horner said
“He did a great job with that and looked like he was managing. It wasn’t a safety concern, it was just uncomfortable to drive.”
This race and the last race of last year both had huge leads wiped out due to safety cars. I am new to racing and this seems completely unfair. Any explanation on why other solutions aren’t possible would be appreciated.
A VSC (virtual safety car) is another option, it means all cars reduce their speed and maintain the time gap to the car in front. This is used when there is an incident that can be cleared quickly, such a a broken wing at turn 1 lap 1, where the marshals can wait for the last car to pass and have time to go onto the track to retrieve the broken bits before cars come around the next time.
But often there isn’t a large enough gap in the race traffic for marshals to go onto the track and clean up an incident, or there is a problem that would take too long to clean up or put marshals in a bad position (even under a VSC, they wouldn’t want marshals on the track on the outside of a turn) so a full safety car is really the only option.
Teams all play by the same rules, and the general feeling is although it might be bad luck one race, they might benefit from a safety car the next race.