F1: Q&A with Christian Horner

Formula 1

F1: Q&A with Christian Horner

Red Bull Racing boss discusses the electronic ghost of Singapore’s Turn 13 that haunted Mark Webber...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted October 02, 2008 Singapore

Some serious weirdness for Webber in Singapore... (LAT photo)

Mark Webber suffered one of the more unusual retirement reasons F1 has ever seen in Singapore when his Red Bull’s gearbox failed after it tried to select two gears at once. Webber’s failure happened at Turn 13, just after the old Anderson Bridge, where Toro Rosso’s Sebastien Bourdais suffered an identical failure in practice. Other teams also noted electronic glitches in the same spot during the weekend, with Force India registering a ghostly clutch request on the car of Adrian Sutil.

So what was the suspected cause? The tourist guides don’t mention the fact that in WW2 the occupying Japanese army hung the severed heads of locals on the bridge. Had the noisy racing cars generated some ghostly interference connected with those tragic events? In fact the gremlins were due to the rather more logical but just as surprising presence of a strong electrical current from an underground train track that passed under the circuit at that point.

In Webber’s case the problem proved terminal, which was especially galling as, like teammate David Coulthard, he’d made a brilliantly called stop just before the pitlane closed. Had he not retired he would have beaten Nico Rosberg to second. SPEEDtv.com spoke to team boss Christian Horner about the mysterious problem.

Q: Did Mark lose a potential second place?

“Definitely! It was bloody frustrating. We made the right call with both drivers, it was absolutely the right team decision. Mark was looking in great shape, he was six laps longer than Fernando [Alonso], and he was sticking with him without any dramas at all. We were looking in good shape. We’d underperformed in qualifying with Mark getting held up on his last run, and we would have had the pace. But we had an absolute freak incident at Turn 13.”

Q: Can you explain what happened?

“There seems to have been an electrical frequency that we’ve seen all weekend. It’s literally from an underground train, underneath the circuit. Bourdais had a gearbox failure on his car within meters at exactly the same point. It seems there is some electrical interference. With Mark basically on that lap at that corner the gearbox has decided, or the Moog valve has decided, to select seventh gear. We’ve had a double select, which is an identical failure to Bourdais’. It’s gone against all the software and code for the box, and we’ve never, ever seen it before. And yet we’ve had two examples within meters of each other at the same corner. We think that it might have had something to do with it.”

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