Exclusive: DC says 'I couldn't hear my beeps!'

David Coulthard came up with one of the most unusual racing driver excuses heard in recent times after a problem with his radio in qualifying.

The Red Bull cars give the drivers an audible beep as an indication of when to change gear - most other cars still use a system of lights on the steering wheel. However, as he started his qualifying lap in Bahrain DC's radio channel was left open, which effectively cancelled out the beep system. When he realised what had happened he had to look at the traditional light warning.

Interestingly Red Bull's own press release completely messed up DC's own story and claims that he said he was not getting the lights...

"I couldn't hear my shift beeps," he told Crash.net. "And I didn't know the radio was on. It cancelled the audio that tells me when to change gear, so I had to go back to using the shift lights. Because it's never happened to me before I didn't know that I had the radio on. It meant that I started the lap and I ran into the limiter on a couple of shifts, until I realised that I had a problem with that.

"The problem with the lights is that you can get sun on them and you can't quite see them that well. I started the lap and understeered wide so I was slow in the first sector, and then I was really a bit messy in the rest of the lap."