Red Bull advisor Helmut Mako, revealed that the identical issue caused Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez to retire in the final stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Charles Leclerc took the lead and won for the first time this season, with Carlos Sainz coming in second to complete a Ferrari one-two.
Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton joined them on the podium, when Verstappen and Perez had their second and fourth places brutally stripped away due to technical concerns. The same issue caused the two Red Bull cars of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez to retire in the closing stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix, according to advisor Dr Helmut Mako.
Max Verstappen confesses that his Red Bull car had various issues after a poor start to the 2017 Formula One season in Bahrain. With just three laps to go, the incumbent world champion was forced to retire after his Red Bull car failed.
During the race, Verstappen berated his team over the radio and complained of battery trouble just before he was forced to pit.
The specific cause is being investigated by Red Bull engineers, although the team has stated that Verstappen was forced to retire due to a ‘fuel pump issue.’
‘We don’t fully understand why it happened but it definitely happened after the tyres came on and I drove off,’ Verstappen said.
‘It wasn’t even that the steering just got heavy, it was almost impossible to steer, and the faster I was going it felt also like there was a delay, so every time I was turning right it took a while before something was happening.’
‘That’s why my restart was really bad. Because I wanted to go on throttle but I couldn’t open my wheel because it was stuck.’
Sergio Perez, Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate, had a fuel pump trouble too and spun off in the final lap, allowing Lewis Hamilton to take third, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. completing a one-two finish.
Verstappen admitted after the race that he was dissatisfied with ‘various situations’ throughout the race and that retiring from races’shouldn’t happen.’
In the coming days, there will surely be some in-depth conversations within Red Bull to figure out why this happened and how it may be avoided in the future.
A double retirement costs a lot of money – Red Bull was up for 30 points this afternoon – and things couldn’t have gone much worse for the Bulls, with Ferrari taking a one-two and Mercedes finishing third and fourth.
