Red Bull completed repairs to Max Verstappen’s car less than 30 seconds before the grid had to be cleared for the race start.
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Team principal Christian Horner praised his mechanics after Verstappen crashed his Red Bull at turn 12 on the reconnaissance lap before the race and said the driver was lucky to make the start at all.
“I think Max went off three times on that lap to the grid and the third one obviously looked pretty terminal,” Horner said. “We could immediately see it looked like the track rod and certainly the push-rod was broken.
“The big question was whether it had damaged the wishbone as well. If it had taken out the wishbone, that would have been game over.”
“So we decided to drive the car to the grid and do our best to repair it there. The mechanics did an unbelievable job. What would usually take an hour and a half they did in 20 minutes and finished with 25 seconds to spare.”
Remarkably, Verstappen reported no suspension problems during the race.
“It wasn’t ideal, but you have to get on with it, and Max didn’t report any issues with the car pulling to one side or anything like that in the race, which was very good.”
After the emergency repair, Verstappen finished second in the race.
“Max put it out of his mind,” Horner said. “He was obviously a bit embarrassed on the grid after causing that amount of work, but he repaid the team by delivering the drive he did.
“The mechanics regrouped and executed another sub-two-second pit stop. They’ve been phenomenal this weekend and he owes them this result.”
FIA race director Michael Masi confirmed the repair work on the grid was supervised. “We had a couple of our technical team down there monitoring it all,” he said. “With regards to time frames and the manner in which everything was achieved, it was all completely compliant.”
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