Red Bull, the favorites to claim the first victory of the season after scaring the competition on the last day of testing in Bahrain, was overtaken by Ferrari when it was mired in mechanical failures that led to two retirements.
Neither of the two Red Bull drivers was able to complete the 57 laps of the Bahrain Grand Prixthe first scoring event of the 2022 season that ended with a Ferrari double that Lewis Hamilton already foresaw in his desperate performance prediction already in preseason when he confessed that his Mercedes W13 was not, far from it, to fight for victories.
The first alarms they started to jump as early as lap 44: Pierre Gasly, aboard his AT03, became a mere passenger as he saw his car shut down completely in the blink of an eye.
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Not only that: in a matter of seconds, the rear of the car was seen engulfed in flameswhich caused the output first of a Virtual Safety Car and later a complete safety car that allowed the firefighters to put out the fire and prevent it from getting bigger, calmly removing a car stranded on the track.
Reliability in question
On the first team side, 10 laps later was when the “worst nightmare” of a Red Bull that comes out with zero points from Sakhir. After reporting on several occasions difficulty when turning the wheel, Max Verstappen also said goodbye to the race with just three laps to go.
The young Dutch driver also had problems with the batteries of his RB18, although the team from the wall assured him that they were not, something to which the #33 responded with an energetic “No!” mad at the radio
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To add insult to injury, the Milton Keynes-based formation saw how, in just a couple of lapsSergio Pérez lost control of his car trying to defend himself and maintain the podium that his teammate had missed moments before without success.
«I don’t remember the last time this happened to usbut obviously it’s your worst nightmare,” conceded Christian Horner, who described what happened in the first race of 2022 as “frustrating.”
Short term solution?
Helmut Marko confirmed to German television that Verstappen and Pérez had the same problem: a fault in the fuel system that had prevented gasoline from reaching the engine, a catastrophic setback. The question now lies in knowing if, as the team suspects, the faulty steering wheel was due to an error with the jack in its stop.
«It’s hugely disappointing, not only losing the podium with Max, but also seeing how we lost it with ‘Checo’ on the last lap. What looked like a decent points haul evaporated in the last two laps,” Horner continued.
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Reliability has thrown away the first points of the year, due to a mechanical setback that they will have to solve immediately if they don’t want to lose control in the championship. «We have to get our batteries on this matter and fight next weekend. The positive for us is that we had a very competitive car. I don’t think we had Charles’s pace today, but there was a great race between him and Max. We were fighting for the victory at different points in the race; it is a very long season, with 23 races », he finished.