Formula One news

Red Bull wary of Singapore power surges

Red Bull Racing will be fitting metal plates to its cars' gearboxes in Singapore this weekend following a strange reason for Mark Webber's retirement from the race last year. The Australian is believed to have retired from the inaugural Formula One night race due to a train on the underground metro line…

Although it may sound weird, post-race investigations by Red Bull revealed that Webber's gearbox had selected two gears simultaneously, naturally resulting in mechanical damage and therefore retirement.

Christian Horner, Red Bull Racing Team Principal

However, the team believes that the reason for such a bizarre happening could have been an electrical surge due to an underground train passing below the track. For this reason, the metal plates have been added to the gearboxes plus updates to its software.

"We had a failure on Mark's car which was very peculiar last year," Team Principal Christian Horner explained. "Basically, two valves were triggered which selected two gears at once; there were a lot of theories last year as to why Mark had his problem but we never found the real reason.

"There were suspicions of static electricity so we've taken some precautions to prevent a repeat of that, including a code change for the software and some (metal) protection that we've added - from what I understand, we're not the only team to add that protection."

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