Christian Horner has confirmed the Red Bull pair of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez retired from the Bahrain Grand Prix with “similar issues”. However, Horner confirmed the team “don’t know” exactly what the issue is at this stage after Verstappen retired from second place.
The double retirement hands an early advantage to Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in the points standings
He said: “What looked like a decent haul of pints suddenly evaporated obviously in the last couple of laps. It looks like a similar issue on both cars we don’t know exactly what it is yet.”
“Whether it’s a lift pump or a collector or something along those lines but we’ve got to get into it and understand exactly what’s caused it.”
Horner added: “Zero points for us is tough. The positive we can take is we’ve had a competitive car. We were fighting for the race win at different points in that race. We’ve got to get on top of these issues quickly and it’s a long, long season, 23 races. But we’ve got to get this behind us and get stuck into the next event.”
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AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly, which runs on the same powertrains Red Bull, also broke down. Gasly caused the late-race safety car after his car pulled off and caught fire on the exit of turn three.
However, Horner stressed the issue was unrelated to the Red Bull pair.
He said: “Pierre’s issue aren’t related. It’s an MGU-K suspected failure on that car. So nothing to do with the issues that Sergio and Max had but we have to get on top of it and on top of it quickly.”
