Max Verstappen and Red Bull - what went wrong after 'worst nightmare?'
A late reliability failure forced reigning world champion Max Verstappen to retire shortly after he lost second place to Carlos Sainz, before teammate Sergio Perez also suffered a suspected engine issue at the first corner of the final lap.
Red Bull team principal Horner said his team had not yet diagnosed the exact cause of the failures but suspects the problem originated in the fuel system. It is thought the same issue affected both RB18 cars.
“I can’t remember the last time that happened to us but obviously it’s your worst nightmare,” Horner said.
"It looks suspiciously like the failures are related to each other,” he added. “It looks like potentially an issue within the fuel system. So it’s very disappointing to lose 30 points.”
Horner said the issue had come “totally out of the blue” without any warning.
“It’s something we haven’t seen previously,” he explained. “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.”
However, Horner insisted the problem is not related to the suspected MGU-K issue that caused Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri to stop on track in the closing stages.
Verstappen also battled a power steering issue in the closing laps of the race that hampered his performance, prompting a furious outburst over team radio.
Horner explained the problem occurred during Verstappen’s final pit stop.
“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,” he said.
“So 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.”
While Verstappen was left understandably disappointed to see 18 points vanish so close to the end, the defending world champion remains upbeat about Red Bull’s prospects for this season given how competitive the RB18 was in Bahrain.
“The steering issue, it was not easy to drive as I had no feeling of what the car was doing because it was not natural,” Verstappen said.
“You can lose power steering or whatever, and it’s just heavy. But this was like it was almost stuck in some places, so really difficult to drive.
“Of course the big problem was what happened afterwards, it looked like there was no fuel coming to the engine and basically everything just turned off so I rolled back into the pit lane.
“It’s not what you want especially after positive test days and a positive weekend and it looked like until the issues we had, we would be in second place.
“That would’ve been still a good result, 18 points and Checo fourth, but to retire with both cars at the end of the race is very disappointing.
"The pace is there, we fought for pole, we fought for the race win. That’s not the problem, we just need to understand the issues we had today and work on the car continuously to improve.”
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