The Red Bull Racing team had a perfect start to the season: 4 wins out of 4 races held so far, equally divided between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez. The Mexican driver was the author of a great weekend in Baku, in which he first managed to win the Sprint Race on Saturday and then, also thanks to a little luck, the Sunday grand prix.
If in the Sprint Race Perez was uncatchable by everyone, luck helped him on Sunday. While teammate Max Verstappen was called into the pits while in first position, Nyck De Vries hit a barrier, breaking his steering arm.
The Dutchman’s AlphaTauri stopped on the track, forcing the race marshals to send the Safety Car onto the track. In all of this Verstappen was the only leading driver to make his pit stop with the regular times, while all the others made use of faster pit stops because they were made under the Safety Car regime.
This sent Verstappen from first to third position, with Sergio Perez first and Charles Leclerc second. The 2-time world champion managed to get rid of the Ferrari driver within a few kilometres, but Perez showed excellent pace, keeping his teammate’s comeback attempts at bay in an admirable and precise manner.
At the time of Verstappen’s pit stop, many were dumbfounded. Of course, the team could not have known that the Safety Car would be sent on track shortly thereafter, but the – relatively – few laps done by Max on Medium compounds were surprising.
To give a key to understanding the incident was the team principal of Red Bull, Christian Horner. “We decided to call Max into the pits at that moment because he was starting to struggle a bit with the rear tires of his car, while Checo was behind him. So we decided that from a strategy point of view this was the right moment to stop”.
“From the images we had related to De Vries, we saw that all 4 wheels were still attached to the car. It appeared that it hadn’t hit the barriers and the engine was still running. It appeared that it had managed to select reverse and could continue So we didn’t expect a Safety Car.”
“Usually if you see a car in the barriers, the safety car goes off in Baku, but there was no sign. It was only later, during the replays, that we could see that the steering arm was broken.”
“At one point we even told our mechanics to get ready for a double stop. It’s one of those occasions where it can go really well, but sometimes it doesn’t.”
The words of the Red Bull team principal then explained the reasons for Verstappen’s pit call. A decision that probably relieved the team of embarrassment: Sergio Perez, after overtaking Leclerc’s Ferrari, had managed to close the gap from Verstappen and, at that juncture, appeared faster and able to attempt an attack.
In the end this was averted, but the RB19 number 11 ended up on the top step of the podium, perhaps the only single-seater that will be able to keep open a World Championship that seems to have already been sealed from the beginning.
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