By radio Max Verstappen after the third pit stop he had communicated to the wall that he was having difficulty with the steering which had suddenly become harder to maneuver. The Red Bull technicians after the first real-time analyzes had communicated to the Dutch driver that they had identified the problem and that this would not get worse, nor obviously improve in the laps that still remained to be covered.
According to the German magazine Auto Motor und Sport the cause of this problem could be identified in a damage to the tie rod by the jack when lifting the car during the third stop in the pits, the one made to fit the soft tires again after a few laps with medium tires. Without the Safety Car, according to the calculations of Milton’s team – at least this is Helmut Marko’s thesis – Verstappen would have reached Leclerc with 2-3 laps to go for a throbbing final.
The final was literally different for Red Bull, which first saw Verstappen’s RB18 # 1 go out, a fate that also affected Sergio Perez’s # 11, spun on the last lap, but already a victim of problems similar to those that forced the Dutchman to return to the pits shortly before. ‘Cooked’ batteries or a simple fuel draw problem, which could have contributed to the non-functioning of the electrical part. These are the probable causes that led to the withdrawal of the Red Bulls, at least according to the hypotheses sketched by the competing teams. The petrol pump it was a component that gave a lot of headaches during the tests in Bahrain to several teams. Faced with those who claim that Red Bull may have simply blatantly mistaken the calculations related to consumption – with the RB18s left ‘dry’ – Christian Horner replied as follows: “We are sure that there was gasoline, we must examine the gasoline pump in detail and understand what went wrong”.
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